Emotional dissonance occurs when the required emotional expression does not match the emotions felt (Lewig and Dollard, 2003). When dissonance occurs the employee may either display his “true” emotions, thereby violating job requirements, or try to display the required emotions (Holman, 2005:114). The intended effects of these emotional displays are on other people, such as customers, subordinates or co-workers (Grandey, 2000). For instance, restaurant waitresses are expected to perform emotional work such as smiling and expressing positive emotions towards clients, flight attendants are encouraged to create good cheer in passengers, and bill collectors promote anxiety in debtors (Tyler and Abbott, 1998:433). Similarly, hospital nurses are expected to express positive emotions towards patients, such as warmth and compassion (Diefendorff and Richard, 2003). Deery and Kinnie (2002:8) maintain that those who perform a “second
shift” of emotional work at home may be more vulnerable to the negative effects of call centre work.
Two issues should be stressed with regard to emotional dissonance. First, some authors focus on the display of emotions required by the organisation, no matter what a person feels (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993). A display of emotion refers to facial expression, bodily behaviour or voice, which are visible aspects of the emotional system (Scherer and Wallbott, 1990, cited in Zapf et al., 1999:380). In the literature, emotional dissonance is seen either as a dependent variable, a state of tension that results when emotional expressions are different from internal feelings (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993), as a stressor that results when the organisationally desired emotion is not felt spontaneously (Grandey, 1998), or as a stressor located in the social environment in terms of a job demand (Zapf, 2002, cited in Grebner et al., 2003:347). Abraham (1998) operationalised emotional dissonance based on Adelman’s (1995) organisational display rules, and then rephrased identical items to reflect the degree to which respondents would actually show corresponding emotions. Different scores for the respective items were then computed to reflect emotional dissonance (Zapf et al., 1999:376). Research has shown that emotional dissonance is generally associated with impaired wellbeing, such as emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, irritation, psychosomatic complaints and reduced job satisfaction (Dormann et al., 2002; Zapf, 2002; Zapf et al., 1999). Emotional dissonance may originate from “faking in good faith” when the employee accepts the underlying display rule or from “faking in bad faith” when the feeling rule is not accepted (Hochschild, 1983; Rafaeli and Sutton, 1989). Various authors (Abraham,
1998; Adelman, 1995) propose that faking in bad faith has the most negative consequences.
Grebner et al.’s (2003) comparison of 234 call centre agents with 572 workers in traditional jobs with lengthy training revealed lower job control and task complexity/variety and higher uncertainty among call agents. Their data confirmed the role of emotional dissonance as a stressor in its own right, as it explained variance in irritated reactions and psychosomatic complaints more than other working conditions. In particular, the experience of emotional dissonance is a specific stressor that is prominent in call centre work (Brotheridge and Lee, 2003). Emotion regulation consumes energy, and consequently performance standards may rapidly decline (Baumeister et al., 1998). Zapf et al. (1999, cited in Zapf et al., 2003:315) have differentiated several aspects of emotion work: the requirement to display positive emotions; the requirement to display and handle negative emotions, which also implies a wide variety of emotions; the requirement to sense the interaction partner’s emotions; and dissonance between felt and displayed emotions. The first three components relate to states external to the worker, whereas the fourth dimension, emotional dissonance, relates to an internal state of conflict (Mann, 1999:369). There must be internal emotional dissonance for emotional labour to exist, and this must be accompanied by a behavioural emotional display. Displays may be “appropriate” because of either explicit or subtle display rules, or simply because of some informal protocol or internal expectation of the worker (Mann, 1999:353).
In another study undertaken by Zapf et al. (2003:311), it is argued that, compared with other groups, CSRs in call centres had to express fewer negative emotions, but were
most frequently exposed to states of emotional dissonance. In most call centres, CSRs are expected to display friendliness and politeness, and the organisational display rules do not allow the display of any negative emotion. This may explain why emotion work in human services jobs seems to be more frequent and more intensive than in call centres, even though emotional dissonance seems to be higher in call centres (Zapf et al., 2003:334). Low complexity, low resources and a relatively high level of emotional dissonance are prevailing problems of call centre work. CSRs are heavily controlled by customers. They must often adhere to clear rules about how to interact with customers, both at the task level (with scripts on how to proceed) and at the interaction level (display rules on being positive and friendly), thereby limiting their possibilities to cope with stressors (Zapf et al., 2003:335).
However, the existence of emotional dissonance in call centres has been disputed. In a study by Wegge et al. (2007:693), call centre work was simulated in an experiment with 96 call centre agents, and emotional dissonance was one of the factors studied. It was found that unfriendly customer behaviour led to more strain and lower call performance than friendly customer behaviour. Nevertheless, contrary to expectations, the availability of video data did not increase the strain of agents. On the contrary, it was found that video-conferencing increased the activity of agents if customers were friendly. Since higher levels of activity may counteract boredom, and because customers often prefer to see their service providers, adding video-conference facilities to call centres seems to be a fruitful way of enriching routine call centre work (Wegge et al., 2007:693).