a balancing act: emotional challenges in the hr roleperpustakaan.unitomo.ac.id/repository/a...

A Balancing Act: Emotional Challenges in the HR Role

Elaine O’Brien and Carol LinehanUniversity College Cork

ABSTRACT Despite much academic work and the development of multiple typologies, we arestill some way from understanding the HR role. There is a dearth of empirical evidence onHR professionals’ work and recent models have been criticized for not adequately reflectingthe challenges of trying to balance competing stakeholder interests. We approach this lacunaby focusing on an issue that has not been fully considered in relation to HR work – emotion.Drawing on the findings of a broader study into emotional labour, we highlight the emotivechallenges inherent in the day-to-day practice of HR. We explore the disjunctions between‘felt’ emotions and those actually displayed to meet differing stakeholders’ expectations. Weshow how achieving an appropriate emotion display is a challenging pursuit given thesecompeting expectations. Our contribution is to elucidate emotional labour in theunder-researched ‘backstage’ professional context, and through our emotion focus to extendour understanding of the complexity of the HR role beyond current prescriptive models.

Keywords: display rules, emotion, emotional labour, HR role, role expectations

INTRODUCTION

The role that human resource (HR) professionals should and do play in the effectivemanagement of the employment relationship remains controversial territory. This isdespite much scholarly work, and the development of multiple HR models and typolo-gies (e.g., Legge, 1978; Storey, 1992; Tyson and Fell, 1986; Ulrich, 1997; Ulrich andBrockbank, 2005; Watson, 1977). Contemporary models propose that the professionoccupies a strategic business partner role, but a closer reading of the critical HRmanagement (HRM) literature demonstrates that debate regarding the empirical validityand usefulness of such models continues (Caldwell, 2003; Caldwell and Storey, 2007;Sisson and Storey, 2000). Criticism centres on a lack of acknowledgment of the inherentduality in HR work arising from competing role demands and trade-offs betweenemployee needs and organizational objectives. In turn, it is argued that the paradoxesfacing the HR practitioner in their everyday work are downplayed (e.g., Caldwell, 2003;

Address for reprints: Elaine O’Brien, School of Management & Marketing, College of Business & Law,University College Cork, College Road, Cork, Ireland ([email protected]).

bs_bs_banner

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 51:8 December 2014doi: 10.1111/joms.12098

mailto:[email protected]

Francis and Keegan, 2006; Hope-Hailey et al., 2005; Legge, 2005; Truss et al., 2002)and the emotional challenges these create ignored (Hiillos, 2004; Rynes, 2004). Further-more, our understanding of how the HR role is actually played by practitioners is limited(Truss et al., 2002), due to the fact that there are few detailed empirical studies that focuson how HR professionals do their jobs (Farndale and Brewster, 2005; Pritchard, 2010;Watson, 2004).

We argue that focusing on the emotional challenges involved in HR work is a usefulway to deepen our understanding of the role, and to move beyond prescriptiveaccounts. Studies of emotion have an increasing profile in organizational research (e.g.,Ashkanasy, 2002; Barsade et al., 2003; Bolton, 2000). Much of this renewed intereststems from Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) seminal book The Managed Heart in which sheproposed the notion of ‘emotional labour’. Hochschild used this term to describe howemployees manage feelings and emotional expression at work to displayorganizationally desired emotions, which are encapsulated in ‘display rules’ (Ekman,1972). Her empirical work highlighted how emotion management at work can make avital contribution to an organization’s success. In turn, the idea that emotion can bekey to achieving a competitive advantage captivated many organizations, and changesin the types of emotion management performances demanded of employees is welldocumented (e.g., Ashkanasy and Daus, 2002; Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002; VanMaanen and Kunda, 1989).

Emotion has however, with a few exceptions (see Hiillos, 2004; Rynes, 2004), yet to beexplored in relation to the work of HR professionals. This is despite the emotionallychallenging situations that inevitably arise out of, for example, performance manage-ment or restructuring and redundancy programmes and from the everyday challenges ofdealing with the (often competing) needs of organizational stakeholders. The currentpaper explores this lacuna in our understanding of the HR role. It draws on the findingsof a broader empirical study which investigated emotional labour (EL) in the HR contextand provides an insight into HR professionals’ EL, illuminating participants’ understand-ing of their role and of the organizational and occupational expectations placed uponthem by various stakeholders.

Using the lens of EL has the potential to make unique contributions to debate aboutthe HR role. First, it could be argued that by investigating the EL of HR professionals wetap into the critical events and experiences (both positive and negative) beyond theprescriptive rhetoric about what HR ‘ought’ to be about. By asking participants torecount events requiring EL, our approach sheds light on their triumphs, challenges, andconflicts. Second, the blending of ‘emotion’ and ‘role’ in our investigation seems par-ticularly congruent as we draw on a conception of ‘role’ that assumes it is fluid, enacted,and constructed from interactions with stakeholders who may accept/reject/resist par-ticular positionings (Davies and Harre, 1999; Harre and van Langenhove, 1999; Trusset al., 2002). We uncover contested and emotive elements of HR work and thus a moreanalytic account of the role is offered than extant conceptions.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: after a discussion of ambiguity inthe HR role, a brief overview of EL and how the concept applies to HR work is given.A description of research methods employed is followed by the presentation of findingsas they relate to participants’ understanding of their role. The paper culminates in a

E. O’Brien and C. Linehan1258


discussion of how the insights provided here contribute to our understanding of the HRrole and of EL in backstage roles.

Duality and Paradox in the HR Role

The HR role is complex and paradoxical in nature. HR practitioners face divergentexpectations and must negotiate the needs and values of multiple stakeholders. From anorganizational point of view, the primary role of an HR professional is to contribute tostrategic business objectives by ensuring that adequate numbers of employees exist, withthe right skills, in the right positions, to achieve business goals (e.g., profitability, expan-sion into new markets). As a business partner and service provider, the HR role holdermust provide managers with information about people-related issues, ensure employeecompliance with company policy, provide employees with timely pay and benefit infor-mation, provide training, and undertake many other tasks associated with achievingbottom-line results (Becker and Huselid, 1998). For employees however, traditionalconceptions of HR as primarily a ‘welfare’ role tend to persist and drive expectations ofrole behaviour (Bolton and Houlihan, 2007; Sisson and Storey, 2000). Employees tendto see the HR professional as someone who will care for their needs and champion theircause.

The HR role is also framed by the broader academic and occupational context. Therise of HRM and the changing nature of HR work have exposed practitioners to newdemands and professional challenges, and many different typologies have been offered tocapture such changes. Most contemporary HR models incorporate both people andprocess aspects of the role as well as operational and strategic activities. For instance,according to Ulrich and Brockbank, the HR professional must be an ‘administrativeexpert’ with an operational focus on improving organizational efficiency but they mustalso be a ‘strategic partner’ and have a future focus of aligning people management withbusiness strategies. Additionally, they must be an ‘employee advocate’ and ‘humanresource developer’ responsible for listening to and responding to employees but alsoensuring that the employer–employee relationship is one of reciprocal value (Ulrich andBrockbank, 2005). This ‘business partner’ framework has been trumpeted as theaspirational ideal for the HR profession (Caldwell, 2003).

HR professionals, it seems, are expected to simultaneously deliver on both social andeconomic criteria (Bolton and Houlihan, 2007). They face the paradox of trying to meetthe dual goals of protecting employee interests while becoming a business partner; tryingto negotiate the ‘caring’ and ‘control’ aspects of the job while keeping all parties ‘on-side’;and trying to maintain an image of competence and credibility in the eyes of manage-ment by implementing strategies and practices that respond to economic circumstanceswhilst maintaining the trust of the workforce.

So where does this leave the HR practitioner who must attempt to understand andenact the various organizational and occupational expectations placed upon them?Unfortunately, because of the relative lack of empirical investigations into HR work, littleis known about how HR professionals make sense of, and try to deliver on, multiple anddiverse role expectations. We can perhaps make inferences from studies of other occu-pational groups’ challenges in dealing with competing role demands. While there are

Emotional Challenges in the HR Role 1259


different conceptualizations of professionalism (see Muzio et al., 2013 for an overview),there is a literature that examines how professionals attempt to construct coherentprofessional identities (e.g., Dirsmith et al., 1997; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003).These however do not tend to focus on emotional demands. There are a few exceptions(e.g., Cascon-Pereira and Hallier, 2012; Harris, 2002; Kosmala and Herrbach, 2006).Kosmala and Herrbach (2006), for instance, explored how varying aspects of profession-alism can engender conflicting emotions for auditors. In brief, they argue that the clashof values of professionalism (built on knowledge base and expertise and involving anethical dimension to auditing) and commercialism (based on being business orientated tomaximize revenue) are irreconcilable. This creates stress and results in auditors adoptinga distancing attitude at work.

In common with these professionals, HR practitioners must learn how to inhabit andenact their role and adhere to their own and other stakeholders’ expectations. Thecomplexities and emotional challenges involved in this role enactment are notadequately reflected in contemporary HR models such as those proposed by Ulrich andcolleagues. The dual goals of protecting employee interests while increasing efficiencyare acknowledged but unitarist assumptions of a happy coincidence between employerand employee needs and interests are taken for granted and the conflicts that face the HRpractitioner are downplayed (Caldwell, 2003; Francis and Keegan, 2006; Hope-Haileyet al., 2005; Legge, 2005; Truss et al., 2002). In turn the ambiguity in HR work (origi-nally highlighted in the writings of Legge, 1978 and Watson, 1977, 1986) has beenneglected (e.g., Francis and Keegan, 2006; Keenoy, 1997, 1999) and the challengesfacing practitioners in trying to achieve a balance between stakeholders’ interests has notbeen given due consideration. As a consequence little is known about the internal roleconflicts and professional and emotional challenges that arise when competing needscollide (Hiillos, 2004; Rynes, 2004).

Emotional Labour

Since Hochschild originally conceived the concept, EL has become a central issue incontemporary research into emotion in organizations (e.g., Ashforth and Humphrey,1993; Zapf, 2002). According to Hochschild (1983), EL is the purposeful effort workersengage in to conform to organizational norms or display rules which dictate the kinds ofemotions employees should and should not express in the performance of their work.Hochschild acknowledged that individuals engage in emotion management in all spheresof life and across the multiple roles they hold at home and work, but she draws adistinction between emotion work and emotional labour. People, she argues, engage in emotionwork in their everyday interactions to ‘create a publicly observable facial and bodilydisplay’ (Hochschild, 1983, p. 7). Emotional labour describes when emotion managementis done within the organizational context in exchange for a wage and occurs when rulesdefining the appropriate display of feelings dictate an outward response that conflictswith the emotion felt inside or when ‘the ought of the feeling struggles with the is’(Hochschild, 1983, p. 61). Hochschild argued that in this context emotion managementtakes a different form because the worker is placed in a position of deference to thecustomer and feeling rules or scripts are management imposed (Payne, 2006). In



response, the employee regulates their emotion and emotional expression to meet therequirements of their job and achieve organizational goals.

Emotional labour is different to considering emotion as a reaction to work because itrefers to intentional efforts to convince others that one feels a particular emotion so as toinfluence how they perceive and react to a situation. It can also be distinguished fromemotional intelligence (EI), described as ‘the ability to monitor one’s own and others’feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guideone’s thinking and action’ (Salovey and Mayer, 1990, p. 189). As Fabian (1999) suggests,EI is having the ability and EL is acting on that ability. EL also recognizes that emotionalfunctioning is situation dependent and influenced by display rules and norms.

Numerous job roles have been shown to require EL, including service personnel suchas waiters/waitresses, call centre agents, and other customer service representatives (e.g.,Grandey et al., 2005; Korczynski, 2003; Shani et al., 2014; Van Maanen, 1991);healthcare workers (e.g., nurses; Smith, 1992); and police officers (e.g., Rafaeli andSutton, 1991). The effective management of emotional expression has been linked toimprovements in sales, quality of team decisions and negotiations (e.g., Grandey andBrauburger, 2002; Pugh, 2001) and is increasingly seen as essential in achieving bottomline results for the organization. Despite the burgeoning studies and advances inconceptualization (e.g., Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993; Grandey, 2000; Morris andFeldman, 1996; Zapf, 2002) our understanding of the EL phenomenon is largely derivedfrom a ‘front of house’ customer-facing service context. This is because EL has primarilybeen conceptualized as the duty of service personnel interacting with customers or thegeneral public and research has been biased towards this domain (e.g., Ashforth andHumphrey, 1993; Ashkanasy and Daus, 2002; Hochschild, 1983; Morris and Feldman,1996). It is only relatively recently that researchers have gone beyond the traditionalfocus to explore EL in ‘backstage’ settings (see Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002;Ogbonna and Harris, 2004; Roach Anleu and Mack, 2005). Indications are that EL is animportant issue in communications between colleagues and with supervisors (Kramerand Hess, 2002; Tschan et al., 2005), amongst leaders (Humphrey et al., 2008), and forprofessional level employees including barristers (Harris, 2002), magistrates (RoachAnleu and Mack, 2005), and lecturers (Ogbonna and Harris, 2004), and is in fact criticalto effective job performance. It has also been suggested that the requirement to controlemotional display on the job will intensify for most job roles (Zapf, 2002) and that toarrive at a more complete understanding of this increasingly important organizationalissue, the research focus needs to shift from frontline service contexts. As such there havebeen multiple calls for the study of EL in more diverse contexts and in particular inprofessional level job roles (e.g., Harris, 2002; Humphrey et al., 2008; Tschan et al.,2005).

Emotional Labour and the HR Role

Given the nature of their work and the emotion engendering situations they face it wouldappear reasonable to assume that the appropriate management of emotion and emo-tional expression is a crucial aspect of HR work. Hochschild (1993) did in fact indicatethat personnel managers engage in EL, stating that:



As part of the personnel manager’s emotional labour he has to learn the company’s‘emotional map’. . . . He has to know where, along an accelerating array of insults,it becomes OK to take offence without too much counter-offence. He has to under-stand what various expressions ‘mean’ for a worker with a given biography, dispo-sition, reputation and status within the company. On an overlay map so to speak,he learns to trace patterns of emotional attribution (for example the secretaries maysay their boss is mad today while his own boss doesn’t think so at all). (Hochschild,1993, p. xi)

Empirical investigations of the emotional labour of HR practitioners though have notbeen forthcoming. This neglect could perhaps be due to the fact that while HR ofteninvolves a customer service orientation, it is a different kind of service role to thatcommonly discussed in the EL literature in that HR professionals generally do not dealwith the public (with the exception of recruitment) and their ‘customers’ tend to becolleagues and other internal organizational constituents. Furthermore, unlike front-lineservice personnel whose work is generally scripted and monitored closely by supervisorsto ensure compliance with organizational rules, HR practitioners have a large degree ofautonomy in performing their role (Watson, 1977, 1986). In fact, given that EL isprimarily conceptualized as the management of emotional expression in response to anorganizationally mandated display (Hochschild, 1983), one could contend that it doesnot apply to HR professionals.

It has been argued however that EL is also performed in response to implicit normsand expectations of role holder behaviour (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1995), and in thisregard it could be considered an aspect of HR work. HR is a functional role whoseorganizational power and influence is restricted and whose members are subject tomultiple expectations, which inevitably influence and constrain practitioner behaviour(Truss et al., 2002). As Caldwell (2003) argues, the roles of HR professionals are ‘mirrorimages of shifting managerial perceptions, judgements and actions, over which personnelpractitioners may have only limited influence’ (p. 1003).

HR practitioners’ working lives, and their behaviour including their emotional behav-iour, are very much constrained by contextual pressures. While research such as thatconducted by Hiillos (2004) highlights that dealing with emotion is a central responsibil-ity of the HR practitioner, it does not explore the expectations for emotional expressionassociated with various HR roles. Nor does it explore how HR practitioners manage andcontrol their own emotions to fulfil job requirements.

In summary, little attention has been given to the emotional challenges inherent in HRwork and, as with most backstage professional roles, the EL of HR professionals has beenpreviously un-researched. The research reported here is part of a broader study toaddress these extant gaps by investigating the emotional challenges HR professionalsface when enacting their role. The wider research was guided by the following questions:Do HR professionals engage in emotional labour? Why and how do they do so? What dothey perceive to be the rules for emotional expression (which emotion displays areallowed, which are not) governing their job role? What are the consequences for indi-viduals of performing such activities? From these findings we present here how HRprofessionals perceive and talk about their role and the corresponding behavioural and



emotional display expectations. Thus we contribute to a contextualized elaboration oftheory both about the HR role and EL in ‘backstage’ roles.

METHOD

This study is guided by the interpretivist view that reality is relative and multiple and thatit is important to understand motives, meanings, reasons, and other subjective experi-ences which are time and context bound (Hudson and Ozanne, 1988). The goal is toconnect the reader to the world of participants in order to facilitate an understanding oftheir subjective experience and illuminate the structures and processes that shape indi-viduals’ lives and their relations with others. The researcher is also historically and locallysituated in the process being studied and thus knowledge is not value free (Denzin, 2001).Therefore any representational form should have enough ‘interpretative sufficiency’(Christians et al., 1993, p. 120) – that is, possess depth, detail, nuance, and coherence toassist the reader in forming critical consciousness (Denzin, 2001). Here this means to givean interpretative portrayal of the emotional labour of HR professionals as perceived andexperienced by role holders themselves and as told to and interpreted by researchers withexperience in the HR field.

Through attending to the detail of participants’ language and accounts we hope togenerate insights into their emotions and experiences and offer a counterpoint to manyprescriptive accounts of the HR role which tend not to be grounded in role holders’ dayto day experiences. By remaining analytically sensitive to how each individual’s accountsheds light on their emotional response and the social context within which it emergesand is constructed, we provide theoretical insights about not only emotion and the HRrole but also the dynamics of EL in backstage roles, an area not currently wellunderstood.

Methods Employed

The research design employed falls within the grounded theory approach (Glaser andStrauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). Given the wealth of research conducted on ELin the service context and more recent research (although limited) on backstage roles, itcould be argued that we are not dealing with a theoretically green-field site and thus aninductive grounded theory approach is not warranted. Our knowledge of backstage ELis however in its infancy and there have been suggestions that models of EL developedin the service context may not be directly transferable to the backstage context (seeHarris, 2002; Ogbonna and Harris, 2004). There has also been little empirical workdone on the enactment of the HR role. However, while ‘pure’ grounded theory requiresthe inductive generation of theory without preconceived concepts, the approach adoptedhere follows that of Strauss and Corbin (1990) in that existing theories and studies servedas a solid foundation from which to explore EL in the HR role. Also, based on Turner’s(1983) pragmatic approach, central concepts such as ‘emotional labour’ and ‘emotionaldisplay’ were broadly defined before data collection. Strauss and Corbin see the litera-ture as an important initial source of knowledge that begins the building of theory. Theaim was to begin the study from this vantage point but to remain open so as not to ‘force’



the data. A similar approach was taken by Harris (2002) in his study of the EL ofbarristers and was designed to provide insights into a framework of EL that is groundedin data but also informed by existing research. Our analysis and the concepts we derivefrom the analysis are influenced by extant theories both in the EL and HR role domains,however by attending to the detail of participants’ accounts and the language used wesought to ‘make the familiar strange’ (Spindler and Spindler, 1982 in Suddaby, 2006,p. 635).

Participants. Given the exploratory nature of the study and the need to understand thecontext of the research, non-probability sampling (also known as judgement or purposivesampling) was deemed appropriate for the current research (see Glaser and Strauss,1967; Pratt, 2009). As Gummeson (1991) argues, unlike quantitative sampling, which isdriven by the imperative of representativeness, qualitative sampling is concerned withthe depth and richness of data. A key issue within non-probability sampling is gaining accessto ‘key’ informants whose knowledge and insights are crucial to understanding thephenomenon being researched (see Crimp and Wright, 1995). In the current case, andfollowing the grounded theory approach, this meant that participants were graduallyselected according to the expected level of new insights they could provide, the need toconfirm/disconfirm propositions that had begun to emerge from initial interviews, andto ensure that interesting issues were further explored.

The first interview was conducted with a senior HR professional. This participant wasasked to provide a list of other HR professionals of varying characteristics who may beinterested and willing to take part in the study. In a snowballing effect each additionalrecruit was asked to generate a similar list of contacts. At the early stages of sampling thechoice of participants was based on a need to get the perspectives of role holders withdifferent characteristics (e.g., varying years of experience, from different organizationallevels, across the main HR areas, male and female). As the study progressed, samplingwas driven by the emerging propositions. For example, where a proposition arose thatthe negative consequences of EL may be offset by having other HR team members toconfide in, an effort was made to recruit a participant who worked in a ‘lone’ HR role tosee if they found engaging in EL more difficult and to uncover alternative copingstrategies they may use.

Fifteen participants (six male; nine female) took part in the study; their HR experienceranged from 2 years to more than 15 years. They came from across the organizationallevels (HR Vice-President – HR Specialist/Officer) and HR areas (Reward & Remu-neration; Training & Organization Development; Recruitment), and from a range ofindustry sectors, including Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical, IT, Leisure/Tourism, Food& Drinks, Public Sector, and Retail. While this choice of sample does not allow for anin-depth analysis of one particular HR specialism, it does give a flavour across the manylevels and diverse aspects of the role.

Data collection methods. Two methods of data collection were employed: (i) in-depth inter-views to generate deep and rich data; and (ii) a diary measure (referred to as ‘InteractionRecords’) to try and reduce the retrospective element of accounts and get ‘live’ examplesof workplace interactions.



In-depth interviews. Interviews lasting 60–90 minutes each were conducted with the 15HR professionals. Five participants were interviewed on two occasions, generating a totalof 20 interviews for the study. Emotion and emotional labour occur in the context of apersonal narrative, history, present and anticipated future (Briner, 1999). Interviewswere thus guided by the view that to understand emotion we need to know about theproximal event that triggered it, how the event came to have meaning, and what theconsequences were. In a method similar to critical incident interviewing (Flanagan,1954), participants were asked to give specific examples of workplace interactions. Theywere asked to describe the background and purpose of the interaction, who was involved,what happened, how they felt during and after, the emotions they displayed, and theoutcomes. Where there was a discrepancy between felt and displayed emotions, furtherprobes were used to understand the reason behind this. Interviews were taped and thentranscribed for analysis purposes.

Diary measure – interaction records. The diary was based on the Rochester Interac-tion Record method (RIR; Nezlek et al., 1983) and followed methods used by Tschanet al. (2005). Following the first interview participants were asked to complete an‘Interaction Record’ (IR) for interactions that lasted more than 10 minutes. Five par-ticipants completed the diary, with 28 IRs being returned. Those that failed to com-plete IRs stated that they could not find the time to do so. The IRs proved useful forproducing examples of EL situations but the recorded data was ‘thin’. Examples givenin the IRs were however explored during a second interview; in this way the recordedinteractions were ‘brought to life’ and the IRs thus proved useful for reducing theretrospective elements of accounts. The data from the IRs was incorporated in theinterview analysis process.

The above methods were deemed most appropriate given the limitations and prac-ticalities of the research context. Whilst the ideal may be to capture the ‘simmer andflow of everyday emotion’ (Fineman, 1993, p. 14) and to try and capture ‘real time’emotion through the use of methods such as intensive ethnographies or participantobservation, the highly sensitive and confidential nature of HR work as a researchcontext meant that getting permission from all parties and access to employ suchmethods was not possible.

There are epistemological concerns regarding the ‘unknowability’ of emotionbecause it is often considered elusive, private, transient, and unmanageable (Sturdy,2003). Many authors suggest that sometimes individuals do not know how they feel, donot understand their own emotions, or are not able to name their own feelings (e.g.,Gerth and Mills, 1953), and this presents obvious problems for accessing emotionthrough self-report. Others highlight that emotions are often disguised to aid self-protection (e.g., Gabriel, 1999). Also, as Samra-Fredericks (2004) argues, the relianceon organizational members deploying a ‘language of emotion’ (Waldron, 1994) canobscure how expressions such as ‘makes me angry’ or ‘it’s so frustrating’ feed intosplit-second interactive routines.

Following Sturdy (2003, pp. 81–105), the position adopted here is that ‘emotion is noless knowable than anything else’ and ‘there is a range of possible and partial ways ofknowing emotion’. The use of probing questions about actual interactions made it



difficult (but not impossible) to ‘fake’ accounts as did the use of questions about oppositecases (i.e., when participants did not comply, or felt a different way). These methodsyielded interesting data not only on EL but on how the participants perceive, experience,and speak about their role.

Analysis. Transcripts were subjected to systematic analysis using techniques associatedwith the grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin,1990).

In grounded theory research, data collection and data analysis are interrelatedthroughout the whole study, and unlike other methods where systematic analysis startsafter all data is collected, the researcher is constantly moving between both processes. Atthe heart of the process is a ‘constant comparison method’ (Glaser and Strauss, 1967);instances of codes, concepts, and categories are continually compared with each other tohighlight similarities and differences.

Analysis began with line-by-line open coding of each transcript. An initial list of codeswas developed from the first interview and revised following analysis of subsequentinterviews. Words and phrases used by the interviewee and deemed of importance tothe research were given a short descriptor phrase or code. Codes that related to acommon theme were grouped together into a concept using the constant comparisonmethod, with in-vivo codes (words which were used by interviewees) being used whereappropriate. Following open-coding, concepts were grouped together into categories.For example, codes in the ‘Rule Enforcer’ category included, amongst others,‘toeing the line’; ‘correcting deviance’; ‘making others aware of standards’; and ‘ruleenforcer’.

Concepts built from these initial codes included: communicating behavioural stand-ards to others, enforcing behavioural standards, and modelling behavioural standards.These concepts made up the eventual category of ‘Rule Enforcer’. This in-vivo code wasdeemed an appropriate one to use as a category as it captured the meaning of what wasbeing described by participants. Each category was developed in this way by lookingacross incidences of occurrence and identifying concepts and sub-categories that couldbe brought together into one core category. This process is referred to by Strauss andCorbin (1990) as axial coding – the data is put back together in new ways by makingconnections between a category and its sub categories.

Coding and categorizing the data however can lead to de-contextualization, so fol-lowing Charmaz’ (2006) recommendation, to understand the links and relationshipsbetween categories as well as contextual issues, the data were analysed on an interactionby interaction basis and then on a whole-case basis. So in a sense the line-by-line codingprocess created the ‘variables’ and analysing the interview on a whole-case basis pro-vided the background within which the variables work together. Subsequently abetween-case comparison (interview by interview) allowed similarities and differences tobe highlighted. A process of memo-taking, where theoretical propositions were noted asthey occurred to the researcher, helped with this process. At this point the researcher wasmoving continuously back and forth between inductive thinking, accessing the extantliterature to aid interpretation and deductive thinking.



FINDINGS

The management of feeling and emotional expression to achieve an organizationallyappropriate emotional display emerged as a central aspect of the HR role. Despite notworking at the customer interface or in an environment where emotional display rulesand scripts are explicitly laid out and compliance monitored by a manager,the HR professionals here felt restricted in their emotional repertoire and pressure toconform to the emotional display requirements of their job role. As one participantput it:

There are rules at play in that no matter what arrives at your door you don’t expresshorror you don’t express complete amazement you would have a fairly blank face butwhen you are finished having that conversation you could be absolutely appalled atwhat is after going on but you don’t display that, because if a person is complainingabout another person there is always two sides to every story, so even if you’re appalledat what this person has told you, the other person could have a completely redeemingreason for what is happening, so you wear a mask and you don’t show your emotions.(P7: Female, HR Manager)

The rules for emotional expression derived from multiple sources including wider normsof professionalism, HR occupational norms, and the individual’s own expectations forthe role. They drove organizational expectations of participants’ behaviour and werereinforced through feedback from peers and the application of sanctions in the case ofdivergence. Failure to conform was perceived as risking personal criticism, negativeevaluation, and in some instances negative consequences for the organization such aslegal action. Avoiding such consequences was a key influence on participant behaviour.In the course of our analysis light was shed on how HR professionals perceive and talkabout their role, responsibilities, and corresponding behavioural and emotional displayexpectations; these are summarized in Table I.

While the dimensions of the HR role and associated emotion displays are presented asdiscrete categories in Table I, it is worth noting that participants might recount enactingany number of these roles and displays in an unfolding interaction. For clarity we nowdiscuss each role and its display rules in turn.

Being Professional

It was apparent that the notion of ‘professionalism’ structures and constrains the behav-iour of HR practitioners and reinforces a work identity that is built on self-discipline.Discourses of professionalism are pervasive for many white collar workers, however hereour interest was in how participants recounted the emotional demands associated withtheir performance as a ‘professional’. At an operational level, being a professional HRpractitioner involved being objective, emotionally detached and separating ‘facts’ andvalue-infused judgements. In turn this meant remaining calm, controlled, and measured;it prohibited the expression of unregulated emotions, as the following quotedemonstrates:



You should remain neutral even though you know the person is wrong . . . you don’twant to get people’s back up. You should listen, observe and be non-judgemental. (P4:Female HRD Specialist)

These expectations are also exemplified by the quote below in which the participantdescribes another HR colleague whom she believes to be a highly effective ‘professional’:

I think that sometimes there is huge drama here but she would never get stressed aboutit, she would never scream at anybody, never raise her voice, she would never be rudeto anybody, she would be very discreet, call someone into an office, just like I thinksomebody professional should behave. (P13: Female, HR Specialist, Recruitment)

There was a general belief that displays of unregulated emotion (and in particularextremes of emotion) would not only be seen by others as unprofessional but would leadto the impression of incompetence, something participants were keen to avoid. Forexample, the participant below described his ‘unprofessional’ reaction when the man-agement team would not agree to his proposal and the result of that reaction:

I got annoyed at the meeting and I turned round and said ‘I thought I was workingwith an enlightened group but obviously not’ and got really defensive, sat back in thechair folded my arms and said not very much just nodded at people. I suppose I wastaking it personally, acting the way I did was not the professional response in my view.

Table I. HR roles and associated display expectations

Role Expectation Display requirement

Being professional Maintains professional detachmentDisplays a ‘can-do’ image‘face of the company’

Suppress overly positive and negativeemotion

Display measured controlExpress positive emotion about self, work,

and the organizationSuppress anxiety and negativity

Rule enforcer Communicates, enforces, and modelsbehavioural standards

‘guardian of the rules’

Express social control emotions (e.g.,disapproval, reprimand)

Honest broker Upholds moral/ethical climatePromotes fairness‘conscience of the business’

Display calm demeanour, impartiality,and objectivity

Champion Provides support to employees andmanagers

Friendly and approachable‘listening ear’

Express empathy, interest, compassion

Cheerleader Responsible for emotional climateEngenders enthusiasm for workManages own and others’ emotions‘happy smiley people’

Display positivity, enthusiasm, jobsatisfaction, and pride in the company



. . . I got feedback from my manager to say I got defensive in the meeting which didn’treally help. (P1: Male, HR Vice-President)

In this situation the individual showed his genuine negative emotions of frustration andannoyance, however he felt his behaviour was inappropriate and he describes showinghis emotions as taking it ‘personally’ and getting ‘defensive’, which is not the ‘profes-sional’ thing to do. This was in turn reinforced by the negative feedback he received fromhis manager. Integral to this view is that to be seen as competent and in control he isrequired to manage his own emotional display and indeed his feelings.

It appears that the powerful appeal of the discourse of professionalism is evoked andmobilized instrumentally by managers through organizational talk (e.g., ‘don’t get defen-sive’) and practices (e.g., feedback on inappropriate behaviour) to achieve organizationalgoals. High value is placed on the capacity to deliver what is required regardless of one’spersonal values and feelings, and the needs of the company are invoked as super-ordinate. This pressure to conform to the professional ideal and to avoid the negativeconsequences of non-conformance drove many EL performances. In fact, it appearedthat performing EL was critical to behaving professionally.

The findings above are consistent with Sachs and Blackmore (1998), who found intheir interviews with workers, that being a ‘professional’ was code for being able toappropriately control one’s emotions. They also reflect much organization theoryaround professionalism (Martin et al., 1998) which emphasizes rationality and down-grades emotion and mirror anecdotal evidence that emotional detachment is equatedwith rational competence ( James, 1993), and emotional control is highly conducive to anindividual’s corporate success (Harris, 2002; Jackall, 1988).

The emotion display rules associated with being professional were not seen asorganizationally specific nor were they viewed as specific to the HR role. Rather theywere deemed part of the general rules that need to be followed to ensure positiverelationships at work and career success. Participants did however feel that the pressureto conform to these display requirements was more intense for those working in HRbecause of the nature of HR work and the particular role they occupy in the organiza-tion, as illustrated in the quotes below:

It just comes with the job and if you feel pissed off or having a bad day or frustratedpeople say ‘oh god, Jesus you’re very, very stressed today what’s wrong with you’ likeyou’re not entitled to have a bad day whereas if I was in another department peoplewould think ‘oh she’s under pressure, she must have a big project on’, there’s leewayfor them but none for us. (P5: Female, HR Generalist)

I think people put HR into a box or onto a platform, people nearly expect people inHR not to have a sense of humour, not to let their hair down, you know you are inHR, you should be the company . . . I suppose the bar is raised that’s the nature of it.(P12: Female, HR Director)

Herman (1968) talked of a kind of generalized inferiority complex of personnel manag-ers, and Legge (1978) and Watson (1977) found personnel managers were obsessed by



their credibility with other management groups. The findings here suggest that concernswith demonstrating credibility and value still echo within the HR profession. Participantswere not only concerned about the negative effect of non-conformance on their ownprofessional image but were aware that as a representative of the HR profession howthey behave during interactions can affect employees’ and other stakeholders’ feelingsabout the integrity and credibility of the HR role:

you are aware yourself that people are looking at you, they are making value judge-ments about you and your profession, particularly because HR isn’t seen as thevalue-added entity, you are determined to prove that worth and that value of yourprofession. (P14: Female, HR Manager)

The HR Director below explains that HR professionals must always wear a ‘mask ofprofessionalism’ because they are the ‘face of the company’. They represent the companywhen dealing with employees in an emotional state and the ramifications of letting themask slip can be serious:

HR is seen as the interface with the company, they are part of the company but if itis being ‘done onto them’ or if it’s retirements its HR people standing up, it should betheir line manager or someone that deals with them on a day-to-day basis, but if youare representing the company on pay increases or if you’re standing in front of thelabour court you are representing the company so you have to have an affiliation withan entity that doesn’t have a face, you are it. (P6: Male, HR Director)

The HR professional is the embodiment of the organization who is expected to becomenot only the face of the company, but the heart of it also. In fulfilling such expectationsthe role holder feels a pressure to wear a mask even when it doesn’t seem to fit. At timesthis can leave them struggling to reconcile how they feel with the expected display, as thefollowing quotes demonstrate:

I suppose part of me felt my heart wasn’t in it but you know you still wore the companyhat and followed it through. . . . It was hard, I felt it was hard to be real. (P11: Male,HR Manager)

I suppose if you are suppressing one emotion such as anger and you’re trying to displayanother emotion, sincerity, there is a mismatch and that’s not going to be congruentin coming across. (P8: Male, HR Manager)

Hochschild claimed that EL arose as workers struggled to reconcile the ‘ought’ with the‘is’, and that clearly comes through in our participants’ accounts of their role. So,contrary to celebration in the academic world of the infusion of emotion intoorganizational life (Fineman, 1993), it appears that administrative rationality (Ashforthand Humphrey, 1995) is alive and well. The discourse of professionalism, which entailsemotional control and suppression, is still deeply ingrained in organizational culture anddisplay expectations and is mobilized to constrain behaviour. Interestingly, while



professionalism is often associated with a lack of emotion (in favour of rationality), herewe see that enacting a professional demeanour can involve significant feats of emotionallabour. In fact, it seemed that the requirement to be ‘professional’ was a baseline roleupon which all the other HR roles sat. As such, professionalism operated as a key driverfor all of the recounted EL performances and interactions. However, additional roleexpectations were layered on top – ‘the bar is raised’ – for the model HR professional,creating further EL requirements that are specific to HR work. We now turn to these.

Rule Enforcer

A central part of the HR role is to specify and communicate the values, ethos, andbehavioural standards of the company. Participants described an expectation for them tobe a ‘rule enforcer’ and ‘the guardian of the rules’:

I suppose the other rule is to be the guardian of the rules. . . . in many ways it can bethe perceived image of the organization you know what I mean and I suppose you’reacting as conduit between the organization and the employee and from that point ofview there is expectations on both sides which may not be the same. (P8: Male, HRManager)

They talked about the need to maintain and reinforce acceptable standards of behaviourin relation to discipline and organizational policies such as absenteeism or equal oppor-tunities. Fulfilling this expectation often meant suppressing felt emotions in favour of amandated display which included the expression of social control emotions such asdisapproval or reprimand. For example, the participant in the excerpt below haddescribed feeling angry and frustrated when a colleague (a senior manager) jeopardizeda disciplinary hearing by not following the script that they had previously agreed upon.The manager made personal comments about the employee’s appearance and theemployee subsequently complained to the shop steward:

a manager was in the wrong and you have to be seen to . . . let that manager knowexactly that, clearly what happened was unacceptable. I could display anger in mytone. . . . I would have been slightly more formal than previous meetings and my tonewould have been sharper and the displeasure would have been noted. . . . it wascontrolled. (P6: Female, HR Manager)

This role holder described feeling a certain amount of empathy for the manager whoacknowledged messing up. In this situation she deemed it appropriate to display thenegative emotions of anger she felt but in a controlled way to ensure the ‘offender’ knewhe had done wrong. The rule enforcer role also extended to ensuring others managedtheir emotional displays in an acceptable way as the following excerpt demonstrates:

I would say to a manager tone down your manner, it is unacceptable to reacthot-headedly and immediately we are trying not to have conflict openly and we are



trying to have them react in a more conservative way, take a breath. (P2: Male, HRManager)

Having to maintain and indeed model the ‘ideal’ standard of behaviour that allemployees must aim to reach inevitably influenced many EL performances:

if we are the ones driving the policies and that stuff you have to be seen to toe the line,if you are not going to let anyone else fall outside the policies you can’t do it yourself.(P3: Female, HR Specialist, Compensation & Benefits)

Although participants bought into this role demand there was a certain element ofoppression and an air of cynicism around the impossible requirement to be perfect. Thisis evident from the quote below in which the participant describes how the need tomaintain emotional control was relayed to her by her manager:

‘manage your state please’ you know you had to completely manage your ‘state’ noteven use [the term] emotions it was described as manage your state at work, it wasover-played and totally ridiculous. (P13: Female, HR Specialist, Recruitment)

These findings highlight that, reminiscent of Storey’s (1992) regulator and aspects ofTyson and Fell’s (1986) clerk of works roles, participants believe that ensuring compli-ance to organizational rules is a key element of their work. This casts doubt on whetherUlrich’s (1997) recommendation that HR must move beyond their conventional role ofpolicy police and regulatory watchdog, has actually been realized. The complianceaspect of the HR role, while a very important dimension (both in practice and in manytypologies), complicates other dimensions. For instance, the expectation to enforce rulespositions HR role holders as an instrument of management control in ensuring no-one‘fell outside the rules’, but as we will see later, participants also saw themselves as havinga special relationship with employees and championing their needs. The multi-facetednature of the role creates challenges for participants’ EL. For example, as we will seebelow, the need to engage in displays of social control emotions does not sit easily withdisplays of calm neutrality associated with being an ‘honest broker’ or displays ofempathy associated with the ‘champion’ role.

Honest Broker

Participants spoke of having to follow due process and be objective and non-judgementalregardless of their own thoughts and feelings in dealing with workplace problems. Theydescribed HR as the ‘conscience of the business’ and the ‘honest broker’ with a respon-sibility for ensuring transparency in decision-making processes and engendering feelingsof trust:

In HR we are seen as the conscience of the business. You have to treat people withoutbias. You have to be the listening ear and the conscience of the business to be able todo that. (P4: Female, HRD Specialist)



They were cognizant of the possible ramifications of their behaviour for themselves andthe organization (e.g., risk of labour court proceedings; what they do can set a precedentfor the future). The HR manager below highlighted this point when talking about adisciplinary meeting regarding an employee’s performance:

the game is based on factual information, and what happened and when and whereand what actions were taken as a result so that in a sense the issues should be judgedabout the facts not how you feel about the facts so that in a sense if you displayemotion regarding it then it comes out in an emotional way then it becomes apersonalized issue and you can’t afford for it to be a personalized issue. I think ina situation like that the process is always more forgiving of a manager because withHR, within the HR role, the onus is on HR to be the guardian of that fairness. (P8:Male, HR Manager)

Additionally there was a belief that responsibility for the organization’s ethical and moralclimate lay firmly at the door of the HR function and that HR professionals themselvesshould be beyond reproach when it came to their behavioural displays:

A HR person has to be super-human, cleaner than clean, there is an expectation, atleast I felt it, that you have to be beyond reproach and honest to the core becauseif you’re not who else is going to be? So there is a certain amount of standardsenforced, it’s down to someone’s personal disposition in so far as no-one is100% squeaky clean but you say as you do and do as you say. (P6: Male, HRDirector)

This expectation to be an independent ‘honest broker’ in negotiating the employmentrelationship bears similarity to Storey’s (1992) contracts manager role and is under-pinned by occupational values of impartiality, neutrality, and fairness. Fulfilling this rolerequired participants to control their emotion in order to remain calm and to be ‘middleof the road’:

you don’t show your emotions, you wouldn’t be middle of the road [if you did] showyour emotions then that person would be able to say this is great she’s on my side now.(P7: Female HR Manager)

Highlighted here is the relational nature of the HR professionals’ emotional labour.Participants were not only concerned about the organizational consequences of theirbehaviour and decisions, they were acutely aware of the potential impacts on workingrelationships and future interactions they may have with the interaction partner. Thusthey managed their emotions to ensure the maintenance of these relationships as thefollowing quote demonstrates:

you’re trying to keep your calmness because you’re going to deal with people againand it’s not like an external person . . . these people you will meet again . . . you reallycan’t lose it. (P9: Female HR Generalist)



We can already see the complexity of requirements in terms of emotional display normsand role enactment. A simplistic division of paternalistic care of employees versus controlof staff behaviour is untenable. The control dimension applies as much, if not more, tothe HR professional (‘has to be super-human’) as it does to other employees. Moreoverthe need to give controlled emotional displays (as a listening ear, the public face, beingbeyond reproach) functions in a variety of ways – to fulfil personal/professional stand-ards for the role, to boost credibility with other organizational stakeholders, to legitimizeone’s position in external facing roles (‘the public face’), and perhaps most importantly toinduce a particular kind of emotional response from the interaction partner, which ofcourse is at the core of emotional labour. Role holders felt the need to ensure the otherperson in the interaction felt the process was fair and the outcome deserved and just,rather than feeling hostile, defiant, or angry. Control through a display of caring(whether that was authentic or not).

Champion

The HR professionals in this study were acutely aware of the organizational audience(i.e., employees, line managers, senior management team) and their varying and some-times conflicting expectations of the HR role provider. They described how employeesexpected them to attend to their needs and promote their welfare – to be the ‘employeechampion’. To meet this expectation they felt they needed to be ‘approachable’ andfriendly – a people person. To show empathy and interest towards the employee and tohide any negative feelings of irritation or annoyance as the following quote demonstrates:

you know people have this kind of idea [about HR] sure you’re looking out foremployees and looking after people, and sometimes a bit of madness takes over . . .someone comes in to tell you their troubles and part of you is like ‘I care because’? . . .but you can’t show that, you have to wear a mask. (P12: Female, HR Director)

From a management or organizational perspective, providing empathy and a ‘listeningear’ to employees was accepted as part of the remit of a HR professional, but only underthe provision that organizational interests are protected at the same time:

With employees you are an employee champion and I don’t mean that in a big sensebut you are theirs, they expect you to treat them with fairness and respect. And froma manager’s point of view, the organizational point of view, that is the case as well butyou do it with minimum cost and minimum interference. (P2: Male, HR Manager)

To add to the complexity of this role, being a champion also meant providing counsel tomanagers in dealing with issues that arose in managing employees and to facilitateproblem-solving, to be on the manager’s side and champion their cause:

if you are very blunt and abrupt with the managers you come across as very hard anduncaring that they don’t feel they can approach you for advice, am I tackling this the



right way? you need to have a good working relationship with . . . [you] have tocontrol it [emotion]. (P10: Female, HR Manager)

In some situations, as will be discussed later, managers’ and employees’ interests andneeds conflicted and trying to champion both often left participants confused aboutwhich emotional display was appropriate and where their allegiance should lie.

The champion role here bears similarities to Ulrich’s conceptualization in that par-ticipants perceived themselves to be representatives of employees. HR professionals arehowever also required to champion managers and protect organizational interests, inUlrich’s terms, to deliver value based on economic criteria. Our findings revealed thatthe welfare aspect of this dual role is more dominant than that implied in Ulrich’sconceptualization and the strength of the role holder’s desire to protect employees cancreate difficult emotional challenges.

Cheerleader

Participants perceived an expectation for them to act as ‘cheerleaders’ which goesbeyond the caring aspects of the champion role described above. The cheerleader rolerequired them to promote job satisfaction, boost employee morale, and engender com-mitment to the company. The emotion display expectations involved proactively helpingto keep employee spirits up and promoting positivity in the organization. This respon-sibility was seen as preventing the HR role holder from ‘whingeing’ or being negative intheir interactions with employees and inevitably drove them to hide any feelings of jobdissatisfaction or frustration they may experience themselves. Maintaining this pretencewas considered stressful and difficult but an essential requirement of the job:

I find it difficult to keep up the pretence, you couldn’t let your guard down, HR arethe happy smiley people, we are always happy and obliging and ready to help. (P5:Female, HR Generalist)

Another HR manager explained why, in a difficult time of change and redundancieswithin the company, even though she was under threat of redundancy herself, shecouldn’t display the genuine emotions she was feeling:

I suppose with that position because of all these other people around you had to bestrong you couldn’t panic, they couldn’t see you panicking, I was the HR person youhad to take it your stride you have to be normal, for other people you had to try andremain calm. (P14: Female, HR Manager)

Participants felt that as HR professionals they need to model confidence, hope, andresilience even when they are facing the same confidence-shattering crisis as otheremployees. Within this lay the assumption that negative emotions are contagious and canspread from individual to individual; the HR professional’s role was to prevent thiscontagion. The cheerleader role of bolstering employees and enhancing feelings of



community and positivity amongst the workforce did appear to come from a position ofensuring positive work outcomes but was underpinned by a genuine concern foremployee needs and well-being.

By examining HR staff accounts of the emotional labour required to balanceorganizational and employee needs we glimpse interesting insights into the dynamics ofemployment relations. It is to that dynamic we turn next by exploring in more detail thetensions between the various roles.

Tension between the roles. Participants described many situations where they found them-selves oscillating between the caring and control aspects of HR. This dilemma wasvividly referred to as the ‘Two Hats of HR’. This exposed the tension between poten-tially incompatible sets of expectations. As one participant put it, HR is the ‘man inthe middle’ caught between the differing expectations about HR allegiances. At timesthese emerged as intra-category tensions; for example, being the ‘champion’ requiredrole holders to display empathy and to pay attention to the needs and aspirations ofemployees, but it also required them to support managers and empathize with them intheir dealings with employees. There are also instances of inter-category tensions; forexample, enacting the ‘rule enforcer’ role required participants to adhere toorganizational policy and display social control emotions, whereas the cheerleader roledemanded that they display positivity and enthuse employees. The ‘honest broker’ rolerequired them to display neutrality and calm objectivity, which can be difficult toreconcile with displaying empathy as an employee champion, or indeed positivity asthe cheerleader.

The difficulty in deciding how to play a situation and dealing with conflicting expec-tations was a recurring theme. In the following situation, the role holder struggles withconflicting emotions evoked by an interaction where he had to dismiss an employee. Hedescribed how he felt:

Well a conflict because on one hand I have to feel sympathy for this individual I havesympathy for the situation they find themselves in, I have sympathy in terms ofprocedure and process if you think about what is the right course of action, but on theother hand if you think about the company and the company name and trying toensure as little damage within the company and externally to the company because inHR you’d always be looking at you are a guardian of the company and the companyname but you also have to champion the employee. (P1: Male, HR Vice-President)

In this situation, as with most similar situations described by participants, the companyhat won out, a desire to follow procedure and process overruled the feelings of empathyfor the employee but the participant described how dealing with such interactions was‘very draining’; and how this affects subsequent interactions: ‘you are certainly not givingit [the next thing] any degree of attention that it deserves’. Such multiple, and at timesconflicting, emotional display requirements can clearly have negative consequences forback stage staff.

As our findings demonstrate, HR practitioners need to create quite complex ELperformances. Emotional display expectations have become an implicit part of the



employment contract, with those not willing/able to conform being subject to negativefeedback and sanctions. However, by evoking ideal HR attributes, organizationaldisplay rules appeal to a professional identity which the individual has been inductedinto through occupational socialization and which they are motivated to protect. HRprofessionals’ EL may not be subject to the same degree of ‘scripted’ regulation asfrontline service staff; rather they are self-policing and self-regulating in relationto organizational rules for emotion display. This is because these rules buildon both occupational and role holders’ expectations of what it is to be an HRprofessional.

These findings are of course bounded by the study limitations. The account givenhere, like all social scientific accounts, is a highly selective and shaped piece of writing(Atkinson, 1990; Watson, 2000) chosen from lengthy interviews. As such what is pre-sented is a contestable social construction (Craib, 1997) and it is acknowledged that theinquirer and the inquired into are interlocked (Al Zeera, 2001). Thus the findings reflectthe researcher’s individual perceptions of what is important and what is reality. Also, wecannot generalize about what all or even most HR professionals do or think on the basisof 15 participants, nor was it the intention here to do so.

This paper does not claim to have tapped the entire domain of potential factors thatsurround emotion and the HR role. The strength of the study lies in the depth of the datagathered about specific interactions. Participants were encouraged to recall and com-municate as depth-fully as possible their experience of thinking, feeling, and behaving.This process elicited a richly nuanced picture of what it meant to the individual toexperience that particular situation, and there is enough interpretative sufficiency(Denzin, 2001) to connect the reader to the world of participants. Further research couldexamine the ‘weight’ of the roles identified by our study for HR practitioners andwhether patterns of EL differ depending on factors such as hierarchical level, specialism,organization, or sector.

DISCUSSION

HR work is emotionally challenging. In addition to finding an acceptable solution toworkplace problems, HR professionals are expected to handle the emotion the situationhas prompted, to be ‘toxin handlers’ (Frost, 2003; Rynes, 2004) and act as emotionalmanagers (Hearn, 1987), who control and contain the emotions of themselves andothers. A wide range of emotion is experienced in the course of doing HR work, fromconcern and empathy, elation and self-worth, to intense frustration and anger. To beeffective however, HR professionals must enact an array of emotional fronts and abideby the emotional display rules of their job. At times, these rules are contradictory, andparticipants spoke of the challenge of managing conflicting emotion display requirementswhile trying to maintain an image of credibility and competence for differentorganizational audiences. These findings highlight the value of using an ‘emotional lens’to bypass the prescriptive rhetoric and often instrumental discourse that underpinscontemporary HR models and has implications for our understanding of both the HRrole and emotional labour.



Implications for Understanding the HR Role

In terms of the HR role, attending to participant accounts of EL brings a richerperspective than that provided by normative models, which may capture variety inherentin the role but downplay the challenges and specifically the emotional challenges thatenacting the role creates. Our participants, for example, were acutely aware of thebehavioural and emotional display expectations held by others and played the HR roleaccordingly (despite how they may really have felt) to achieve task goals and maintaineffective working relationships. This not only suggests, similar to Truss et al. (2002), thatthe roles HR professionals play are contextually embedded and locally negotiatedbetween practitioners and stakeholders, it highlights that creating complex EL perfor-mances is an integral aspect of such roles.

Our findings also suggest that the duality and ambiguity in HR work, originallyhighlighted by Legge and Watson more than 30 years ago, persists and that emotionmanagement is central in handling the dilemmas that arise out of this duality. Partici-pants felt they should advocate for employees but they also had a strong need to protecttheir own image and that of the HR function as a valuable contributor to bottom lineresults. These dual expectations had the potential to evoke intense mixed emotions inrole holders and they worked to find a balanced and optimal course of action thatsatisfied all constituents. This reinforces the view that the HR function is vulnerable tonegative images and HR practitioners are still concerned with their status, legitimacy,and credibility (e.g., Caldwell, 2003; Farndale and Brewster, 2005; Legge, 2005); andsuggests that appropriately managing emotion is pivotal in this image maintenanceprocess.

Furthermore, while some analysts argue that HR professionals have abandonedemployees in the attempt to enhance their own position vis-à-vis management (Peterson,2004), our analysis suggests that both the social values of personnel management and theeconomic values of HRM shape expectations about how the HR role should be played.Here we see the tough choices that confront the human agents who enact HR policy.How HR ‘is done’ in practice is the outcome of ‘human interpretations, conflicts,confusions, guesses and rationalisations’ (Watson, 2004, p. 458), all of which are emo-tionally charged and operate within the constraints of what is expected by stakeholders.In contrast to the sometimes simplistic discourses (as noted by Watson, 2004) aboutchoices between ‘caring’ or ‘control’ and ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ models and practices of HRM,using the lens of emotion we see that HR professionals must give layered performancesof ‘hard and soft’ and ‘caring and control’. There are complex and subtle interplaysbetween caring, control, and many other emotion displays; for example, achievingcontrol through an insincere but effective display of caring, or genuinely feeling empathyyet displaying neutral emotions to maintain a stance of objectivity in an interaction.Focusing on emotion reveals both the personal struggle in reconciling ‘caring andcontrol’, and also the inherent tensions between business and humanistic values inemployment relationships.

So, far from being an ideological choice made by either individuals or their organi-zation, the balance struck between caring and control in HR is a highly contextualizedand situated one. How our participants behaved tended to be a function of who was



present in the interaction and the possible outcomes for the organization, the employees,and the HR practitioners themselves. Thus their role was a shifting one; at timesparticipants acted more as a representative of the employer and at other times they weremore on the employee side. By using language such as ‘display’, ‘role’, and ‘performance’we are not however suggesting a moral levity and latitude in HR professionals’ roleenactment. From our participants, there is a palpable sense that HR practitionersstruggle to produce displays that are answerable both to their own values and to those ofother stakeholders. Thus the defining feature of EL as stemming from a disjunctionbetween the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ applies to more than just emotion display; it also appliesto values in employment relationships. Interestingly, while Harris (2002) suggested thatthe EL of ‘status’ professions (e.g., barristers) could be differentiated from occupationalprofessions such as engineers, accountants, or HR, by a commitment to serve a greatergood, we see echoes of such concerns here with HR professionals’ EL being driven inpart by serving the needs of the organization but also by what they deem ‘is right’ foremployees. This may derive from two interacting factors: (i) historically, the welfare rootsof personnel management; and (ii) a contemporary process of an occupational professionseeking to increase its status via the appropriation of status professions’ discourses aboutprofessional concerns for a self-regulating code of practice and sense of a higher purpose(beyond a given task or job).

Such a picture contradicts analyses of HR work, which suggest that the role of HRprofessionals is becoming predominantly driven by economic and business values.Rather, our findings support the more pluralist perspective of Paauwe (2004) and others(e.g., Caldwell, 2003; Francis and Keegan, 2006) and the empirical work of Ramsay et al.(2000) that suggest that the economic side of organizing and the human side of organ-izing sometimes coincide and sometimes conflict. Our study shows both variety andcontradiction in HR roles and supports Caldwell’s (2001, pp. 39–53) assertion that HRmanagers in the ‘real world’ have to live with overlapping, conflicting, and sometimesconfusing roles and must blend ‘old’ and ‘new’ roles. We add that this ambivalencecreates intense emotional challenges for the practitioner, a point that HRM models tendto ignore but if acknowledged, could develop our understanding of role realities.

Implications for Emotional Labour

In terms of EL, our work makes a contribution to the comparatively under-researchedbut growing recognition of EL in professional/backstage work.

Finding that HR professionals feel pressure to abide by emotion display requirementssupports research which suggests that EL is an issue for non-customer facing, profes-sional level jobs and is performed in interactions with colleagues, peers, and supervisors(e.g., Brotheridge and Lee, 2003; Clarke et al., 2007; Humphrey et al., 2008; Kramerand Hess, 2002; Tschan et al., 2005; Waldron, 1994) rather than being restricted tointeractions with external customers. Relating back to Hochschild’s conceptualization ofEL, it appears the profit motive is slipped in under acts of emotion management whetherone is paid a wage or a salary. Our findings however suggest that backstage EL may bea more complex and dynamic process than that reported in the service literature.



The question then is raised – do back- and front-stage EL warrant differentconceptualizations? Contextual factors potentially make the backstage EL of HR pro-fessionals different and more complex than that of frontline service workers. Forinstance, unlike many front-stage roles, HR professionals’ EL is largely unscripted.Display rules for the HR role are ambiguous, implicit, and rarely addressed inorganizational training/induction, and they also derive from multiple sources ratherthan just being prescribed by management. Also, unlike the service context where EL isgenerally performed in a highly repetitive fashion using a narrow range of emotions(Humphrey et al., 2008), HR role holders have to display a wide variety of emotionsdepending on the particular situation. For instance, in the customer service environmentthe expectation is generally to promote a positive emotional state – that is, ‘keep thecustomer happy’ (Hochschild, 1983); HR professionals however are expected to producefeelings of trust, integrity, and fairness. They do this in situations where ‘customers’ mayfeel their job or professional reputations are under threat (e.g., in performance manage-ment or disciplinary situations). They may be dealing with trade union officials whoinherently distrust HR as ‘the face of the company’ and are trying to move the interac-tion partner from a position of trust deficit rather than neutrality. Under some circum-stances (e.g., redundancies) the HR role holder may even be subject to the same personalanxieties as the interaction partner because their own job may be under threat. Suchsituations are far removed from the delivery of ‘service with a smile’ (Leidner, 1993) andthe stakes are likely to be higher for both the organization (e.g., industrial unrest, legalaction) and the individual (e.g., sanctions such as discipline or dismissal) if an appropriatedisplay is not achieved.

To add to the above complexity, EL in HR work is also likely to be performed ina context of ‘high strength’ relationships (Groth et al., 2004). Unlike the frontlinewhere interactions are likely to be ‘low strength’ one-off encounters, HR professionalsare likely to have a relationship, a shared history, and expectation of future interac-tions with the EL target. The norms for long-term relationships, as Argyle andHenderson (1985) note, often contain a requirement to be honest, and if the interac-tion partner detects that emotion is fake it can have detrimental consequences. Thiscan make achieving the appropriate display more onerous than one-off service encoun-ters. Furthermore, unlike service personnel who tend to have low to moderate roleidentification (see Humphrey et al., 2008), HR role holders are likely to view theirwork as an integral part of themselves, and not living up to the perceived demands ofthat role can have negative impacts on self-esteem. So while at times EL was per-formed for the benefit of the organization, it was also agentively performed to achievetask and personal goals. This contrasts with the dominant view in the service literaturethat EL is an example of exploitation and the employee’s passive compliance with theorganizational mandate (e.g., Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993; Constanti and Gibbs,2005; Hochschild, 1983).

Couple the high identification with job autonomy, and the context for performing ELin the backstage HR role presents as very different to the front-line service context. Evenwhen they are invested in their role, service personnel typically have little autonomy andcontrol in how they meet the demands of their job (Leidner, 1993; Wharton, 1993). Rigidrules and bureaucratic settings can limit autonomy even for those working beyond the



front-line, such as nurses and police officers (Wolkomir and Powers, 2007). HR profes-sionals on the other hand have more autonomy and scope to regulate their own emotionmanagement.

Such context differences may indeed suggest that EL is fundamentally different in theback and front stage. An alternative view is that perhaps some of the aspects of EL thathave emerged here as a result of looking at the backstage environment may also operatefront stage. Researchers, blinkered by a negative view of EL, may have missed the roleof individual agency, the influence of forces external to the organization (such as pro-fessional norms, occupational ideals, and the individual’s own expectations for the role),and the possible benefits of performing EL for the individual (such as a sense of self-efficacy and esteem from living up to a role with which one identifies). This suggestion isbolstered by recent research in a service environment (Ashforth et al., 2008), whichfound that rather than acquiescing with display rules, service agents proactively engagein EL to control service encounters, steering the direction and emotional tone of theinteraction. This more dynamic view of EL has however yet to find its way intoconceptualizations of EL in the service context. Perhaps by reviewing front-stage ELunder refracted light from backstage research, we may see a more multi-dimensionalphenomenon.

In addition to implications for front-stage EL, our findings support and extend pre-vious research in the backstage domain which has highlighted the difficulty of ascribingthe performance of EL to one single variable in the organizational context, such asmanagement control through prescriptive display rules (see, e.g., Bolton, 2000; Harris,2002; Ogbonna and Harris, 2004). For example, Ogbonna and Harris (2004) identifiedthat occupational as well as organizational expectations could drive lecturers’ emotionallabour. Our novel contribution is to show variety within the categories of occupationaland organizational expectations and thus attendant variety in the emotion displaysrequired. Sources of variety stemmed from, for example, which stakeholders are involvedin the encounter, and what the interests of stakeholders may be relative to the issue atplay, and thus which occupational expectations were prioritized – for example to berational and detached and suppress emotion in one situation or to demonstrate empathyin another. We also extend Harris’ (2002) work, where the rules for barristers’ emotiondisplays – while often challenging and complex – did not appear to be contradictory. Wewould attribute the contradictions in HR professionals’ EL in part to ambiguities in theHR role (as discussed earlier – whose interests they ought to serve), and in part to the lackof explicit training and socialization in what ought to be done/displayed – in starkcontrast to the barristers in Harris (2002) who had lengthy apprenticeships with ‘pupilmasters’ in order to perfect the right ‘demeanour’.

So whilst the current study has contributed to our understanding of EL in thebackstage context, further research is clearly needed. In particular, exploring the varietyof ways employees conform to, resist, or indeed embrace organizational controls and therelated identity construction and management processes, may offer a more rounded viewof the EL construct in both the back- and front-stage contexts.

This study was conducted to explore the emotional challenges in HR work, an areathat had not been previously investigated. Here we capture a picture of HR practitionersas thinking, acting, and especially feeling individuals who work within a micro and macro



political context (Watson, 2004). They face a precarious balancing act of representingemployee needs and implementing a business agenda, while at the same time attemptingto maintain a trusting working relationship with employees and an image of competenceand credibility in the eyes of line and senior managers. Our study suggests that handlingthe emotions that work situations prompt and creating the appropriate emotional displayis central to successfully achieving this balance. Watson (1986) once suggested that ‘towatch a personnel manager operating over a period of time is to go through a process ofconstantly wondering whether one is seeing the wielding of an iron fist in a velvet gloveor a velvet fist in an iron glove’ (pp. 180–83). This image vividly portrays the roledilemmas of caring versus control, but based on our research does not capture fully therealities of more nuanced HR performances which might be more accurately portrayedas the improvising actor hiding their emotions behind the many masks expected by theiraudience, even when such masks do not seem to fit.

REFERENCES

Al Zeera, Z. (2001). Wholeness and Holiness Education: An Islamic Perspective. Herndon, VA: InternationalInstitute of Islamic Thought.

Argyle, M. and Henderson, M. (1985). ‘The rules of relationships’. In Duck, S. and Perlman, D. (Eds),Understanding Personal Relationships. London: Sage, 63–84.

Ashforth, B. E. and Humphrey, R. H. (1993). ‘Emotional labour in service roles: the influence of identity’.Academy of Management Review, 18, 88–115.

Ashforth, B. E. and Humphrey, R. H. (1995). ‘Emotion in the workplace: a reappraisal’. Human Relations, 48,97–125.

Ashforth, B. E., Kulik, C. T. and Tomiuk, M. A. (2008). ‘How service agents manage the person–roleinterface’. Group & Organization Management, 33, 5–45.

Ashkanasy, N. M. (2002). ‘Studies of cognition and emotion in organisations: attribution, affective events,emotional intelligence and perception of emotion’. Australian Journal of Management, 27, 11–20.

Ashkanasy, N. M. and Daus, C. S. (2002). ‘Emotion in the workplace: the new challenge for managers’.Academy of Management Executive, 16, 76–86.

Atkinson, P. (1990). The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Construction of Reality. London: Routledge.Barsade, S. G., Brief, A. P. and Spataro, S. E. (2003). ‘The affective revolution in organisational behaviour:

the emergence of a paradigm’. In Greenberg, J. (Ed.), OB: The State of the Science, 2nd edition. Hillsdale,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 3–52.

Becker, B. and Huselid, M. (1998). ‘High performance work systems and firm performance: a synthesis ofresearch and managerial implications’. Research in Personnel and Human Resource Management, 16, 53–101.

Bolton, S. (2000). ‘Who cares? Offering emotion work as a “gift” in the nursing labour process’. Journal ofAdvanced Nursing, 32, 580–6.

Bolton, S. and Houlihan, S. (Eds). (2007). Searching for the Human in Human Resource Management: Theory, Practiceand Workplace Contexts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Briner, R. B. (1999). ‘The neglect and importance of emotion at work’. European Journal of Work andOrganisational Psychology, 8, 323–46.

Brotheridge, C. and Grandey, A. (2002). ‘Emotional labor and burnout: comparing two perspectives of“people work” ’. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 60, 17–39.

Brotheridge, C. and Lee, R. T. (2003). ‘Testing a conservation of resources model of the dynamics ofemotional labour’. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 7, 57–67.

Caldwell, R. (2001). ‘Champions, adaptors, consultants and synergists: the new change agents in HRM’.Human Resource Management Journal, 11, 39–53.

Caldwell, R. (2003). ‘The changing role of personnel managers: old ambiguities, new uncertainties’. Journalof Management Studies, 40, 983–1005.

Caldwell, R. and Storey, J. (2007). ‘The HR function integration or fragmentation’. In Storey, J. (Ed.),Human Resource Management: A Critical Text, 3rd edition. London: Thomson Learning, 21–38.

Cascon-Pereira, R. and Hallier, J. (2012). ‘Getting that certain feeling: the role of emotions in the meaning,construction and enactment of doctor managers’ identities’. British Journal of Management, 23, 130–44.



Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing Grounded Theory. A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. London: Sage.Christians, C. G., Ferre, J. P. and Fackler, P. M. (1993). Good News: Social Ethics and the Press. New York:

Oxford University Press.Clarke, C., Hope-Hailey, V. and Kelliher, C. (2007). ‘Being real or really being someone else?’. European

Management Journal, 25, 92–103.Constanti, C. and Gibbs, P. (2005). ‘Emotional labour and surplus value: the case of holiday reps’. The Services

Industries Journal, 25, 103–16.Craib, I. (1997). Classical Social Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Crimp, M. and Wright, L. T. (1995). The Market Research Process. London: Prentice Hall.Davies, B. and Harre, R. (1999). ‘Positioning and personhood’. In Harre, R. and van Langenhove, L. (Eds),

Positioning Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 32–52.Denzin, N. K. (2001). Interpretative Interactionism, 2nd edition. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Dirsmith, M. W., Heian, J. B. and Covaleski, M. A. (1997). ‘Structure and agency in an institutionalized

setting: the application and social transformation of control in the big six’. Accounting, Organization andSociety, 22, 1–27.

Ekman, P. (1972). ‘Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion’. In Cole, J. (Ed.),Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1971. Vol. 19. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,202–82.

Fabian, J. C. (1999). Emotion work as instrumental action: the pursuit of goals in an organizational context. Unpublisheddoctoral dissertation, George Washington University. Washington DC.

Farndale, E. and Brewster, C. (2005). ‘In search of legitimacy: personnel management associations world-wide’. Human Resource Management Journal, 15, 33–48.

Fineman, S. E. (1993). Emotion in Organisations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Flanagan, J. C. (1954). ‘The critical incident technique’. Psychological Bulletin, 51, 327–58.Francis, H. and Keegan, A. (2006). ‘The changing face of HRM: in search of balance’. Human Resource

Management Journal, 16, 231–49.Frost, P. J. (2003). Toxic Emotion at Work: How Compassionate Managers Handle Pain and Conflict. Boston, MA:

Harvard Business School Press.Gabriel, Y. (1999). Organisations in Depth: The Psychoanalysis of Organizations. London: Sage.Gerth, H. and Mills, C. W. (1953). Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions. New York:

Harcourt, Brace & World.Glaser, B. G. and Strauss, A. L. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research.

Chicago, IL: Aldine.Grandey, A. A. (2000). ‘Emotion regulation in the workplace: a new way to conceptualise emotional labour’.

Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5, 95–100.Grandey, A. A. and Brauburger, A. L. (2002). ‘The emotion regulation behind the customer service smile’.

In Lord, R., Klimoski, R. and Kanfer, R. (Eds), Emotions in the Workplace. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 260–94.

Grandey, A. A., Fisk, G. M. and Steiner, D. D. (2005). ‘Must “service with a smile” be stressful? Themoderating role of personal control for American and French employees’. Journal of Applied Psychology,90, 893–904.

Groth, M., Hennig-Thurau, T. and Walsh, G. (2004). A conceptual model of the effects of emotional labour strategieson customer outcomes. Paper presented at 4th Emotions Conference. Birbeck London.

Gummeson, E. (1991). Qualitative Methods in Management Research. London: Sage.Harre, R. and van Langenhove, L. (Eds). (1999). Positioning Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.Harris, L. C. (2002). ‘The emotional labour of barristers: an exploration of emotional labour by status

professionals’. Journal of Management Studies, 39, 553–84.Hearn, J. (1987). The Gender of Oppression. Men, Masculinity and the Critque of Marxism. New York: St. Martin’s

Press.Herman, S. M. (1968). The People Specialists. New York: Alfred Knopf.Hiillos, M. (2004). Personnel managers and crisis situations: emotion handling strategies. PhD Thesis. Swedish School

of Economics and Business Administration. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/10227/108 (accessed 3March 2011).

Hochschild, A. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press.

Hochschild, A. (1993). ‘Preface’. In Fineman, S. (Ed.), Emotion in Organisations. London: Sage, ix–xiii.Hope-Hailey, V., Farndale, E. and Truss, C. (2005). ‘The HR department’s role in organisational perfor-

mance’. Human Resource Management Journal, 15, 49–66.



http://hdl.handle.net/10227/108

Hudson, L. A. and Ozanne, J. L. (1988). ‘Alternative ways of seeking knowledge in consumer research’.Journal of Consumer Research, 14, 508–21.

Humphrey, R. H., Pollack, J. M. and Hawver, T. (2008). ‘Leading with emotional labour’. Journal ofManagerial Psychology, 23, 151–68.

Jackall, R. (1988). Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.James, N. (1993). ‘Divisions of emotional labour: disclosure and cancer’. In Fineman, S. (Ed.), Emotion in

Organisations. London: Sage, 94–117.Keenoy, T. (1997). ‘Review article: HRMism and the languages of re-presentation’. Journal of Management

Studies, 34, 825–41.Keenoy, T. (1999). ‘A hologram: a polemic’. Journal of Management Studies, 36, 1–23.Korczynski, M. (2003). ‘Communities of coping: collective emotional labour in service roles’. Organisation, 10,

55–79.Kosmala, K. and Herrbach, O. (2006). ‘The ambivalence of professional identity: on cynicism and

jouissance in audit firms’. Human Relations, 59, 1393–428.Kramer, M. and Hess, J. A. (2002). ‘Communication rules for the display of emotions in organisational

settings’. Management Communication Quarterly, 16, 67–80.Legge, K. (1978). Power, Innovation and Problem Solving in Personnel Management. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill.Legge, K. (2005). Human Resource Management: Rhetorics and Realities, anniversary edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave

MacMillan.Leidner, R. (1993). Fast Food Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinisation of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press.Martin, J., Knopokk, K. and Beckman, C. (1998). ‘An alternative to bureaucratic impersonality

and emotional labor: bounded emotionality at the Body Shop’. Administrative Science Quarterly, 43,429–69.

Morris, J. A. and Feldman, D. C. (1996). ‘The dimensions, antecedents and consequences of emotionlabour’. Academy of Management Review, 21, 986–1010.

Muzio, D., Brock, D. M. and Suddaby, R. (2013). ‘Professions and institutional change: towards aninstitutionalist sociology of the professions’. Journal of Management Studies, 50, 699–721.

Nezlek, J. B., Wheeler, L. and Reis, H. T. (1983). ‘Studies of social participation’. In Reis, H. T. (Ed.),Naturalistic Approaches to Studying Social Interaction. New Direction for Methodology of Social and Behavioural Sciences.Vol. 15. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 57–73.

Ogbonna, E. and Harris, L. C. (2004). ‘Work intensification and emotional labour among UK universitylecturers: an exploratory study’. Organisation Studies, 25, 1185–203.

Paauwe, J. (2004). HRM and Performance: Achieving Long-Term Viability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Payne, J. (2006). ‘What’s wrong with emotional labour?’. Research Paper 65. SKOPE, University of Warwick.Peterson, R. B. (2004). ‘A call for testing our assumptions: human resource management today’. Journal of

Management Inquiry, 13, 192–202.Pratt, M. G. (2009). ‘For the lack of a boilerplate: tips on writing up (and reviewing) qualitative research’.

Academy of Management Journal, 52, 856–62.Pritchard, K. (2010). ‘Becoming a HR strategic partner: tales of transition’. Human Resource Management

Journal, 20, 175–88.Pugh, S. D. (2001). ‘Service with a smile: emotional contagion in the service encounter’. Academy of

Management Journal, 44, 1018–27.Rafaeli, A. and Sutton, R. I. (1991). ‘Emotional contrast strategies as means of social influence: lessons from

criminal interrogators and bill collectors’. Academy of Management Journal, 34, 749–75.Ramsay, H., Scholarios, D. and Harley, B. (2000). ‘Employees and high performance work systems: testing

inside the black box’. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 38, 501–31.Roach Anleu, S. and Mack, K. (2005). ‘Magistrates everyday work and emotional labour’. Journal of Law and

Society, 32, 590–614.Rynes, S. L. (2004). ‘Where do we go from here? Imaging new roles for human resources’. Journal of

Management Inquiry, 13, 203–13.Sachs, J. and Blackmore, J. (1998). ‘You never show you can’t cope: women in school leadership roles

managing their emotions’. Gender and Education, 10, 265–79.Salovey, P. and Mayer, J. D. (1990). ‘Emotional intelligence’. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9, 185–211.Samra-Fredericks, D. (2004). ‘Talk in interaction/conversation analysis’. In Cassell, C. and Symon, G. (Eds),

Essential Guide to Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research. London: Sage, 214–27.Shani, A., Uriely, N. and Ginsburg, L. (2014). ‘Emotional labour in the hospitality industry: the influence of

contextual factors’. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 37, 150–8.



Sisson, K. and Storey, J. (2000). Realities of Human Resource Management: Managing the Employment Relationship.Buckingham: Open University Press.

Smith, P. (1992). The Emotional Labour of Nursing: How Nurses Care. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Storey, J. (1992). Developments in the Management of Human Resources. Oxford: Blackwell.Strauss, A. L. and Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques.

Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Sturdy, A. (2003). ‘Knowing the unknowable? A discussion of methodological and theoretical issues in

emotion research and organisational studies’. Organisation, 10, 81–105.Suddaby, R. (2006). ‘What grounded theory is not’. Academy of Management Journal, 49, 633–42.Sveningsson, S. and Alvesson, M. (2003). ‘Managing managerial identities: organizational fragmentation,

discourse and identity struggle’. Human Relations, 56, 1163–93.Truss, C., Gratton, L., Hope-Hailey, V., Stiles, P. and Zaleska, J. (2002). ‘Paying the piper: choice and

constraint in changing HR functional roles’. Human Resource Management Journal, 12, 39–63.Tschan, F., Rochat, S. and Zapf, D. (2005). ‘It’s not only clients: studying emotion work with clients and

co-workers with an event-sampling approach’. Journal of Occupational Psychology, 78, 195–220.Turner, B. A. (1983). ‘The use of grounded theory for qualitative analysis of organisational behaviour’.

Journal of Management Studies, 20, 333–48.Tyson, S. and Fell, A. (1986). Evaluating the Personnel Function. London: Hutchinson.Ulrich, D. (1997). Human Resources Champions. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.Ulrich, D. and Brockbank, W. (2005). The HR Value Proposition. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.Van Maanen, J. (1991). ‘The smile factory: work at Disneyland’. In Frost, P., Moore, L., Louis, M.,

Lundberg, C. and Martin, J. (Eds), Reframing Organisational Culture. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 58–76.Van Maanen, J. and Kunda, G. (1989). ‘ “Real feelings”: emotional expression and organisational culture’.

In Cummings, L. L. and Staw, B. M. (Eds), Research in Organisational Behaviour. Vol. 11. Greenwich, CT:JAI Press, 43–103.

Waldron, V. R. (1994). ‘Once more with feeling: reconsidering the role of emotion in work’. In Deetz, S. A.(Ed.), Communication Yearbook. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 388–416.

Watson, T. J. (1977). The Personnel Managers. London: Routledge.Watson, T. J. (1986). Management, Organisation and Employment Strategy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Watson, T. J. (2000). ‘Ethnographic fiction science: making sense of managerial work and organisational

research processes with Caroline and Terry’. Organisation, 73, 513–34.Watson, T. J. (2004). ‘HRM and critical social science analysis’. Journal of Management Studies, 41, 447–68.Wharton, A. S. (1993). ‘The affective consequences of service work: managing emotions on the job’. Work and

Occupation, 20, 205–32.Wolkomir, M. and Powers, J. (2007). ‘Helping women and protecting the self: the challenge of emotional

labour in an abortion clinic’. Qualitative Sociology, 30, 153–69.Zapf, D. (2002). ‘Emotion work and psychological well-being. A review of the literature and some conceptual

considerations’. Human Resource Management Review, 12, 237–68.



a balancing act: emotional challenges in the hr roleperpustakaan.unitomo.ac.id/repository/a...

Documents