A phenomenographic study of emotional labour in service failure and recovery encounters

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the La Trobe Business School, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

This thesis examines how service employees experience emotional labour in the context of service failure and recovery encounters, particularly in the aviation industry. Services marketing recognises that the interaction between service employees and customers is the core experience during service delivery that influences customers' perceptions of service quality. Thus, it is necessary for managers or employers to regulate or manage employees' behaviour or emotional expressions to ensure service quality and customer satisfaction that lead to customer loyalty and repurchase intention. By reviewing the emotional labour literature of more than three decades, it has been observed that emotional labour is widely researched from different perspectives with different research methodologies, wherein the quantitative research papers are dominant. The literature also reveals that the conceptions of emotional labour have been under-researched, particularly in such a specific context as service failure and recovery encounter whilst a large number of studies emphasise the negative effects on service employees who have to act out certain emotions, for example, emotional exhaustion, emotional dissonance, job satisfaction. stress or burnout. Research is needed to consider whether emotional labour in service failure and recovery encounters is constituted by a static list of attributes described through surface acting or deep acting as suggested by dominant rationalist researchers, or whether it may be perceived in a different perspective from the service employee's point of view. Based on a phenomenographic approach, this study has deployed a combination of individual interviews, observations and focus group interviews to explore service employee's conceptions of emotional labour through experiences in service failure and recovery contexts amongst forty Customer Service Agents (CSA) of a South East Asian airline. An analysis of the findings identified key variations in the CSAs' understanding of emotional labour in negative service encounters. Three qualitatively different ways that service employees experience emotional labour in the circumstance of service failures and recovery encounters are described as: 1) Subservient emotional labour, which refers to the suppression of inner feelings when displaying appropriate outward behaviours as demanded by organisational display rules; 2) Presentational emotional labour, which refers to the regulation of inner feelings when displaying appropriate outward behaviours as required by both organisational display rules and social norms; and 3) Empathetic emotional labour, which refers to the experience of appropriate outward behaviours directed by social norms and religious beliefs. The findings of this study contribute to the emotional labour literature by providing an alternative understanding of how emotional labour is constituted in service failure and recovery encounters from the service employee's view, in comparison with those conceptions defined by Bolton (2005) and Theodosius (2008). A hierarchy in these three conceptions has been developed. The research results have major implications for services marketing and human resources. The contributions involve, for service marketing, further development of the Nguyen and McColl-Kennedy's (McColl-Kennedy, 2003; Nguyen and McColl-Kennedy, 2002) causal framework of service failure and negative emotions perceived through the customer's cognitive appraisal process to the researcher's cause-related emotion management in service failure and negative emotions. For human resources, the contribution involves designing contextual questions or scenarios for behavioural interviews during the selection and recruitment process and shifting the least comprehensive conception to the most desired conception by reflective dialogues.