The Antecedents of Call Centre Workers’ Emotional Expression
The scientific organization of work, initially applied to the industrial sector, has gradually spread to the service sector. In these workplaces, the control of labour extends to the assessment of the employee’s behaviour that is based on the expression of emotions as prescribed by management. Call centres are a prime example: call centre workers are required to respect organizational rules that dictate the emotions they must express during interactions with customers. However, during these interactions, call centre workers do not always manage to hide their own true emotions and so they behave in a way that does not conform to management’s expectations. This failure to control call centre workers’ emotions is a major issue for the companies involved since it can lead to a reduction in customer satisfaction or even the loss of customers. Using a theoretical framework of emotional work, this study seeks to identify the main causes of appropriate or deviant behaviour of call centre workers as they interact with customers. This article is original in three ways. It is the first study to consider the evolution and origins of emotional expression in call centres. Furthermore, it comprises an in situ observational methodology with the observed emotions being displayed in an encoding grid that evaluates the degree of deviance of the prescribed emotions based on 347 conversations. Finally, it considers the influence of the social structure as a way of enriching the analysis of the negative impact of certain variables on the emotional expression of call centre workers. This article shows that it is mainly the situations of interaction (workload, time of call) as well as the rules established by management (call duration, lack of opportunity to take time out after a difficult call, lack of flexibility in responding to customers) that promote dysfunctional behaviour. However, the study also shows that the perception of a high level of tolerance of deviant behaviour on the part of the employer acts to reinforce such behaviour.