An Organisational Study on the Effects of Intrinsic Customer Service Demands: A Perspective from Emotional Labour Theory

• Main Author: Babatunde Akanji
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2016-08-01
• Series: Studies in Business and Economics
• Subjects: emotional labour; call-centres outlets; nigeria; non-western context; telephone agents
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/sbe-2016-0016

The purpose of this research is to examine employees’ views on adverse consequences caused by strict compliance to display rules of intrinsic labour demands as against its appropriate necessities within a call centre context. Using an interpretative phenomenological methodology for the study analysis, 25 semi-structured interviews were conducted with telephone agents working in a call centre outlet in Lagos state, Nigeria. Based on the emotional labour theory, enquires were made about general outcomes experienced from conforming to organisational rules of emotional management during customer service encounters. Findings confirmed that the adversarial impact of affective conformity tends to threaten the positive intentions of these mandatory components of service work. Thus, a proposed theoretical model emerged from the study’s interpretive accounts Based on these significant research findings, detailed practical implications were discussed on ways in which call centre businesses operating in a non-Western context can extenuate poor affective deliveries arising from mismanagement of emotional labour.