The classic book <i>Moral Mazes</i> talks at length about emotional labor in organizational management.<p>One of its primary claims is that HR and marketing function essentially purely as emotional labor (the book would treat legal compliance as a distinct category), and has a whole chapter called, "Dexterity with Symbols" that is a breakdown of how management and executives need to communicate with vague, symbolic language that can never been pinned down to specific claims or specific requirements, so as to allow virtually anything that is said to be reinterpreted as-needed to retrospectively imply whatever is expedient for the executives, particularly from an emotional labor point of view.<p>I think this is a huge component of why software companies use open-plan offices, and in fact sometimes <i>pay higher prices</i> just to have an open-plan office (not even talking about any of the arguments about lost productivity or reduced communication in open-plan spaces, just purely the real estate costs).<p>It's a form of emotional labor. The company gets to see who will express outward fealty to the management, like a dog rolling over to expose its tummy. Who will drink the Kool-Aid about "collaboration" and "entrepreneurial spirit" and give emotional labor outwardly praising the open plan office designs, despite inwardly knowing they are miserable, anti-productive and anti-ergonomic spaces.
Not what the article is getting at, but I have seen displays of righteous anger cause positive changes. Sometimes you need to communicate that you aren't just griping and this is a red line.<p>Doesn't work if people already think your a hot head though.
I got burned out by trying to be the code hero. Then I realized there really isn't any point to this line of work. It is the epitome of "progress only for the sake of progress".
Haven't read the article, but I know that faking your feelings is a great way to subtract from team morale, particularly in situations most susceptible to tension. Sure you may keep your job, but great workplaces don't get to be great workplaces by instilling fear in people so they don't speak up about issues or bother to understand the personalities of their colleagues. If all of your colleagues are sociopaths, you're going to have a bad time.<p>Edit: That's not to say that you shouldn't necessarily be principled about these things.
When you bottle things up for months and months you eventually get your own Wikipedia page:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBlue_flight_attendant_incident" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBlue_flight_attendant_incid...</a><p>When people are forced to keep up that fake smile, the people they interact with start taking advantage. Then eventually the person behind the smile cracks, grabs "two beers and exited the plane by deploying the evacuation slide".
Note that this article uses a somewhat older and more specific definition of emotional labor, casting it as something done in the course of paid work. These days, it is also commonly recognized to occur in <i>unpaid</i> contexts. (Maybe it was in the 1960s as well, but <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor</a> doesn't seem to cover that.)<p>Having a friend lean on you during a breakup, and helping them process their feelings -- that's unpaid emotional labor. Which is fine! It's just good to recognize it, especially because there's a gender imbalance. Women are commonly expected to provide unpaid emotional labor in the domestic and social spheres, and in traditional labor contexts, women are commonly expected to provide emotional labor on top of their other job duties in ways that men are not.
> having feelings at work<p>i go to work to complete an objective and get paid. feelings are personal and not something i care to share with workplace associates or strangers. of course, this means that i'm totally unsuited for any kind of non-technical, customer-facing work. except maybe a bar or restaurant that wants bitchy/sarcastic staff.<p>i'm sort of lucky that i work it tech, but i'd be pretty happy doing construction or anything that involves doing stuff other than talking to customers.
Why giving generalized advice without conditioning on context-dependence is bad.<p>Edit: Sorry, I now see that the real article has all the proper "can"'s, instead of "is"'s, I was missing.
I mean, the whole enterprise is damaging. Workplaces are not humane, they're hostile (in a blithe, disavowed way of course) and overtly not designed for the interests of the people occupying them. Including whether it's considered appropriate to show your feelings (usually no).