英國薩里大學酒店管理留學生dissertation-Research significance

 

Beijing is the area in which there are the most five star hotels in China and the hotels have the best profit, the management models and processes of five star hotels in Beijing are also objects for five star hotels in other parts of China to imitate and learn (Wu, et al., 2013). Therefore, problems in the management of emotional labour in five star hotels in Beijing represent the problems in the management of emotional labour in five star hotels in the entire Chinese five star hotels to some extent, thus it takes five star hotels in Beijing as an object of this study.

 

In this study, it discusses the emotional labour management of 5 star hotels in Beijing, China, it understands the problems existing in emotional labour management of five -star hotels in Beijing and the consequent negative impact brought by this, hoping to cause managers’ attention for conditions of employees’ emotional labour. Finally, the dissertation puts forward specific measures for emotional labour management of 5 star hotels in Beijing, which has a certain significance for human resource management practices of 5 star hotels in Beijing.

 

Research aims and objectives

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how to enhance employees’ ability to manage emotional labour for increased performance: a case study of 5 star hotels in China. Based on this, it forms the following objectives.

Objective 1: to understand the emotion management ability of employees’ of different departments in 5 star hotels in Beijing

Objective 2: to understand the performance of emotional labour of employees’ of different departments in 5 star hotels in Beijing

Objective 3: to discuss the relationship between the emotion management ability and the performance of emotional labour of employees’ of different departments in 

 

star hotels in Beijing

Objective 4: to discuss the relationship between the emotional labour and the job requirements of employees’ of different departments in 5 star hotels in Beijing

Objectives 5: to find how to help employees of different departments in 5 star hotels in Beijing to manage their emotional labour

 

Framework of the dissertation

Chapters of this dissertation are organized as follow. The first part is introduction, it is a brief introduction of the research background, significance and aims of this study. The second part is the literature review of researches of related fields, it reviews literatures relating to emotional labour, as well as the concept, characteristics and dimensions of emotional labour management. It also reviews researches focusing on emotional labour, features and status of emotional labour management of hotel industry, carrying out a critical analysis on the literatures and pointing out the theoretical significance of the dissertation. The third part is the research design chapter, it mainly describes the research philosophy, research approach, research object, measurement tool, research hypothesis, data processing method and other content of the study. The fourth chapter is the research results. This chapter explains the results of the questionnaire, combining with relevant literatures to analyze and discuss these questionnaire results. The fifth part is the conclusion of the study. This chapter summarizes the results of the study, pointing out the limitations of this study and bringing forward directions for future research. Related recommendations have been put forward for emotional labour management of five -star hotels for Beijing.#p#分頁標題#e#

Chapter II Literature Review

 

Introduction of this chapter 

This chapter reviews literatures relating to emotional labour, by carrying out a critical analysis towards the literatures to point out the theoretical significance of this dissertation.

 

Overview of emotional labour

Definition of emotional labour 

Emotional labour refers to organisational expectations for employees when they interact with customers (how long, how intense, how often) and a person’s internal state of tension when he or she displays emotions that are contrary with his or her true feelings (emotional dissonance). Grandey (2000) suggests that the four dimensions of emotional labour cannot fully explain the emotional management process of the employees. Although different scholars define emotional labour differently, they have agreed that people can regulate their emotional expressions at work (Chu and Murrmann, 2006).

 

Emotional labour means that a person’s enhancing, faking or suppressing his emotions to regulate  emotional expression. Hochschild (1983), Lucas and Deery (2004) defined emotional labour as management of feelings show observable facial and bodily display publicly. Hochschild (1983) argues that if employees are required to control their emotions for a wage, they will be away from their true feelings. Employees are required to be happy under pressure, which seems more authentic to customers (Bulan et al., 1997; Henig-Thurau et al., 2006). Emotional labour is based on a service-acting paradigm that compares service to a “show”, the service employee to the “actor”, the “audience” to the customer and the work setting to the “stage” (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993). Ashforth and Lee (1990), Grandey et al. (2002) analyze that emotional labour enhances the efficiency of job performance, reduces interpersonal problems and the necessity for direct control. Ashforth and Humogrey (1993), Orpen (1995) believe that emotional labour displays proper emotions with the goal to engage in a form of impression management for an organisation. Ashforth and Humogrey (1993), Morris and Feldman (1996) propose that emotional labour must be positively related to task effectiveness, so as to make customers to take they perceived expression as sincere. If employees do not show genuine expressions, emotional labour creates a need to dissociate employees from themselves. Emotions can be modified and controlled by an individual and the broader social setting determines when that happens (Hochschild, 1983; Humphrey, 1993; Grandey, 2000).

 

Types of emotional labour

Emotional labour is essentially the behaviour that an individual regulates its emotion, it is carried out based on the management objectives of emotional behaviour that an organization develops (Vincent, 2011). The core of emotional labour is the process that employees regulate their emotion in an organization. According to the ways that individuals’ adjust their emotion in an organization, emotional labour can be divided into two types (Chan, 2012). One is regulating the feeling. It focuses on processing of a person’s personal inherent conflict, anxiety, tension, as well as other feelings, so as to make his or her mood better. Such regulation is actually more the regulation which is carried out towards cognitive evaluation process (Chan, 2012). The other type of emotional labour pays attention to regulating the external manifestation of feeling. In organizations, individuals show emotional expression which meet requirements of particular goals (Chan, 2012). In the study of emotional labour, the former is known as deep acting, which requires employees to conduct more cognitive regulation, it takes regulating subjective feelings as the goal. The later is named surface acting, it mainly regulates external behaviour, which emphasizes regulation of emotional behaviour (White, 2009)

 

Ogbonna and Harris (2004) believe that surface acting may occur in more habitual routine process. This process is more grounded in a semi-automated state, it does not need much conscious processing, nor does it need to make too much cognitive effort (Othman, et al., 2008). For example, in service industry, some waiters smile when they greet customers, which may be an automated response, no matter how bad their inner experience is. Therefore, surface acting may require less mental effort. Deep acting takes place in the intellectual level of behaviour patterns, it needs the involvement of a considerable part of consciousness, which may need to use and consume more psychological resources (Bolton, 2008). Townsend (2008) brings forward resource conservation theory, which is from another angle to gives different research and analysis. He found that, compared with deep acting, as surface acting movements needs to conduct false emotional expression, it diminishes self-realism. He suggests that employees make effort to meet job requirements, in this process, they focus only on surface acting controlled by external expression behaviour, which is easier to harm employees’ true self-feelings, employees may be required to pay more mental resources. Therefore, they are more vulnerable to mental fatigue. Mitchell and Smith (2008) pointed out that deep acting requires employees to focus on regulating inner experience, regulating more from a cognitive perspective to achieve organizational requirements for individuals’ emotional expression. Therefore, deep acting has more consistency between inner experience and expression, which can enhance personal accomplishment.

 

Considering from the basic process and mode of emotion regulation, surface acting includes more regulation of expression behaviour, such as inhibition of expression behaviour which is experiencing negative emotion, disguising the expression behaviour of positive emotion that companies need (Guerrier and Adib, 2003). Deep acting not only suppresses negative emotion that is felt, showing the positive emotion that an organization needs, it is also from cognitive perspective to conduct more regulation (Wellington and Bryson, 2001). It is worth noting that the regulation that deep labour carries out from the perspective of cognitive appraisal can make better consistency between expression behaviour, cognitive appraisal and emotion experience, and surface labour will cause a greater inconsistencies (Scholes, 1996). This inconsistency may consume more psychological resources, so that an individual more conflict, self-authenticity is decreased and it will be more easily fatigued. Therefore, judging from the analysis of possibility of changes in the composition of emotion in the basic process of emotion regulation, surface labour may be a form of labour which is not easy to cause positive results, while deep labour may be more active (Wellington and Bryson, 2001).

 

Bhave and Glomb’s (2013) experimental results show that in a contact-based service environment of a low level, whether employees perform a surface or deep acting, staff’s performance of positive emotion can enhance customers’ perceived service quality. In a highly contact-based service environment, the performance that employees perform through deep acting and surface acting has  different effects on customers’ evaluated  quality of service,  surface acting will make customers feel hypocritical, deep acting will make customers feel sincere and credible (Lopez, 2006).