MAN 3110 Module 2 Self-Awareness Exercise Example

Smiling Through the Late Seating: Emotional Labor, Stress and Job Resources in Front-of-House Theater Work

Student Name

B.S.B.A. in Human Resources/Organizational Management, Thomas Edison State University

MAN-3110: Organizational Behavior

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Smiling Through the Late Seating: Emotional Labor, Stress and Job Resources in Front-of-House Theater Work

I am the house manager at the Raritan Stage Company, the theater I described in my Module 1 exercise. I supervise eight part-time ushers and box office staff, manage seating and patron complaints at every performance and serve as the person audiences see when anything goes wrong. Module 2 examines individuals in organizations, including personality, attitudes, emotions and stress (George & Jones, 2012). This exercise looks at three of those concepts in my own work.

Emotional Labor in My Job

Much of my job is managing my own emotions so that patrons have a good evening. When a subscriber arrives twenty minutes late and insists on being seated during a quiet scene, I must stay calm, sympathetic and firm, even when I am frustrated. Grandey (2000) described emotional labor as the process of regulating feelings and their expression to meet organizational goals, and distinguished two strategies. Surface acting means displaying an emotion one does not feel, such as a smile over irritation. Deep acting means changing one's own feelings, for example by reframing the situation, so that the displayed emotion is genuine. She linked surface acting in particular to stress and exhaustion.

Looking honestly at my own habits, I surface act more than I deep act, especially late in long weeks. I smile and apologize while silently counting the minutes until intermission. When I manage to reframe, reminding myself that the late subscriber has probably been stuck on Route 18 and has supported the theater for twenty years, the conversation goes better and I feel less drained afterward. The difference is noticeable: on nights when I mostly surface act, I go home exhausted even if nothing went wrong.

I also notice a pattern in which patrons trigger surface acting. Complaints delivered with contempt, rather than frustration, make deep acting much harder for me, and those are the encounters after which I most need a break. Knowing that helps me plan: on nights with a sold-out house and a strict late-seating policy, I now station an experienced usher at the door so that I am not handling every difficult arrival alone.

Stress During Opening Week

The most stressful period in my year is the week a production opens. Final dress rehearsals, an invited preview, press night and the first public performances all fall within six days, and my staff work long evenings with patrons who expect perfection. The job demands-resources model helps explain why some opening weeks wear me down and others do not. Bakker and Demerouti (2007) summarized research showing that job demands, such as workload, time pressure and emotional demands, lead mainly to strain and exhaustion, while job resources, such as support, autonomy, feedback and opportunities to develop, lead mainly to engagement, and that resources can buffer the effect of high demands.

My opening weeks fit this pattern. Last fall, during a production with a complicated late-seating policy and a sold-out run, demands were high, but the stage manager briefed me daily, the managing director backed my decisions with difficult patrons and two experienced ushers handled the lobby without supervision. I was tired but engaged. In the spring, with similar demands, one usher quit, the late-seating policy changed twice without explanation and I could not reach anyone when a patron fell ill. The demands were no higher, but the resources were missing, and by Sunday I was exhausted and short with my own staff.

Personality plays a part too. I am conscientious and like to control details, which makes changing policies especially stressful for me; a colleague who is more relaxed about details found the spring production much less taxing. The demands were the same for both of us, but our responses differed.

What I Will Change

This exercise suggests three changes. First, I will practice deep acting deliberately: before each performance I will remind myself why patrons may arrive stressed and what they have given the theater, and after difficult encounters I will take two minutes away from the lobby rather than going straight to the next patron. Second, I will protect my resources during opening weeks by asking for a standing ten-minute briefing with the stage manager and a written late-seating policy agreed before the first preview, and by scheduling my most experienced ushers for opening week rather than distributing them evenly. Third, I will extend the same resources to my staff: clear policies, a quick debrief after any difficult patron interaction and recognition at the end of each run.

Those changes are small, but the research suggests they target the right mechanisms: reducing reliance on surface acting, and increasing the resources that keep high demands from turning into exhaustion. I will judge their effect by how I feel at the end of the next opening week and by whether my ushers stay for the full season.

Conclusion

Examining my own work through these concepts changed how I see it. Fatigue after a long run is not simply a matter of working too many hours; it depends on how I manage emotions in front of patrons and on whether the organization gives me the support to meet high demands. Both are within reach of practical change.

References

Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007). The job demands-resources model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309-328. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940710733115

George, J. M., & Jones, G. R. (2012). Understanding and managing organizational behavior (6th ed.). Pearson Prentice Hall.

Grandey, A. A. (2000). Emotion regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(1), 95-110. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.5.1.95