Emotional Labour of Human Resource Professionals

What is it about?

The work that Human Resource Professionals (HRPs) do in managing emotion in HR practice has largely gone unacknowledged and unsupported but is arguably HR’s most value-added activity. HRPs deal with emotionally intense situations (disciplinaries, grievances) and how such situations are handled has the potential to yield serious consequences for the organisation (negative organisational climate, labour court proceedings) or alternatively to foster positive work relationships and promote a healthy emotional climate. Through in-depth interviews and diary study with practitioners our research uncovers the emotion handling aspect of HR work and asks what organisations can do to prepare and support HRPs in this role. We focus specifically on ‘Emotional Labour’ i.e. the management of feelings and emotional expression to conform to organisationally desired emotional displays. For example, during redundancies HRPs often mop up feelings of anger towards the company despite the fact that they may be going through the same anxiety as employees. Regardless of how they may actually feel, the HRP must suppress any felt anxiety and instead express a calm demeanour and professional detachment to do their job effectively.

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Why is it important?

Our findings demonstrate that HRPs regularly perform emotional labour. While at times doing so led to positive consequences, such as feelings of accomplishment, participants generally experienced this aspect of their work as stressful leading to exhaustion which tended to spill over to home life. There are a number of things organisations can do to mitigate this. For instance HRPs are generally left to ‘sink or swim’ when it comes to the emotional demands of the role. Such demands are not addressed in formal education or in organisational socialisation practices leading to a ‘reality shock’ for newcomers to the role. In other occupations such as fire-fighters, induction training explicitly focuses on dealing with emotionally charged events, there are planned activities to expose newcomers to such events and de-briefing sessions where employees can talk about the event. HRPs, we argue, would benefit from such practices. Our findings suggest that emotion management competence develops over time with exposure to emotionally difficult situations and through modelling the behavioural reactions of senior role holders. We suggest that training and mentoring role holders in emotional labour may facilitate positive personal outcomes. Supported exposure to emotionally intense situations and planned rotation across the HR specialisms would also develop emotional capabilities. Senior HRPs and HR educators should lead the way in ensuring that the emotional challenges of the HR role is not a taboo subject. Listening to other HRPs’ stories of emotional experiences at work could provide insights into the strategies that are more or less helpful. Organisations should also provide space and time for HRPs to give each other support. In some organisations this might mean something as fundamental as adapting the physical work space design to ensure there are off-stage/private areas for informal chats and in others it may mean putting in place regular sharing and de-briefing time.

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