Emotional Labour Mechanisms - Term Paper Example

Huang and Dai (2010) defined emotional contagion as a situation where a person’s emotions and behaviour trigger or cause similar reactions to emotions and behaviour in other people. In other words, emotional contagion represents a contagious emotion that usually takes place in a work setting. While emotional contagion situations may be experienced in several work settings, Huang and Dai (2010) shared that service encounters are more likely to experience such experiences. By service encounters, reference is made to any forms of transactional interactions in which a person normally provides service to a different person, usually a customer (Grandey et al., 2005). In a study by Du et al. (2014), it was found that emotional contagion and how it is used in service encounters can be responsible for service failure.

Service providers are expected to exhibit specific contagious positive emotions towards their customers to ensure customers' needs are met. Specifically, Du et al. (2014) opined that service providers always have the responsibility of predicting the kind of emotions and behaviours expected by customers within a given service context. When service providers can see customer expectations rightly, it is easier to put up such emotions and behaviours to meet customers' expectations and thus cause the customers to get along with the positive emotion or behaviour.

There have been specific researches conducted in typical service encounters to ascertain the impact of emotional contagion on customer service outcomes. An example of such study was by Du et al. (2014), which involved two experiments. The respondents used in the experiments were individual customers receiving service as against group customers receiving service. In the first experiment, Du et al. (2014) actually found that negative emotions such as anger in group service failure are higher than those in individual group service failure.