The Emotional Toll of Frontline Labor

For more than two decades, Alicia Grandey , a professor of psychology at Penn State, has been studying how the mistreatment of frontline service workers affects their health and productivity. The behavior she examines ranges from verbal abuse to racial or sexual harassment. She also looks at ambiguous circumstances, in which it’s unclear whether any harm was meant, such as when a customer doesn’t hold the door for an employee walking behind them. With reports of incivility on the front lines of business increasing, we spoke with Grandey to find out what companies should know about how customer interactions affect both employees and businesses. What follows is an edited conversation. Your research has shown that employees experience incivility more frequently from customers than from colleagues. Why is that? First of all, we’re primarily looking at one-off customer encounters, rather than at the ongoing relationships that, say, a salon stylist has with their clients. With strangers there’s less accountability: Customers don’t feel like they have to play by the rules, because there aren’t any negative repercussions for them. Add to that the global axiom that “the customer is always right,” and many customers have the sense that they’re entitled to act however they want to. Together, these factors set up the same power differential that an employee experiences with their boss, but without the ongoing relationship that can discourage bad behavior. It’s important to point out that incivility typically doesn’t happen very often to most employees — on average, once every few months. But incivility from customers is twice as likely to occur as incivility from coworkers or supervisors. And the emotional effects on the employee can last beyond that day. Customer incivility to frontline workers got a lot of attention during the pandemic lockdowns. Why is it such a problem for companies now? While a lot was made of an increase in the mistreatment of frontline workers during the pandemic, I haven’t seen any evidence supporting the idea that customers have actually become more uncivil toward employees. It’s possible that there was an increase in perceptions of mistreatment; we know that incivility is in the eye of the beholder and that it can be driven by emotions. So, if employees were exhausted due to understaffing and scared about contagion — as they might well have been — they could have perceived some discourtesy in ambiguous interactions. But if there’s a silver lining of the pandemic, I think it’s that we’re now paying more attention to customer mistreatment of workers, because we’re finally more aware that the mental and physical well-being of employees is critical to functioning workplaces. With the Great Resignation, we’ve seen that employees are saying it’s not worth it anymore — rather than dealing with customers’ bad behavior, they can go get a higher-paid remote or desk job. Companies need to fill these frontline slots, so for once service employees have some power. What is it about an uncivil interaction that causes harm? The direct cost is that being the target of incivility or even just observing it can make us go into fight-or-flight mode, which takes our cognitive processing power away from the thing we are trying to focus on. That can be particularly true if the mistreatment is ambiguous — if the employee has to wonder “Was that rudeness? Did they mean it that way?” They ruminate and get distracted. But there’s also an indirect cost that comes from frontline service workers’ typically being required — either by their company or by societal norms — to provide “service with a smile,” even when a customer is rude to them. The consequences can be high if they don’t: They won’t get tipped or might lose their job. So the indirect cost factors in when the employee has to expend energy to suppress their natural response. I’m holding my hand over my stomach as we talk about this, because often we physically feel the tension of “faking it” in our gut. That’s what we call emotional labor, and that labor is real, just like lifting boxes is real physical labor. Do service workers in different kinds of jobs experience customer incivility differently? Those with lower status — frontline workers in retail or fast food, for example — have more-frequent interactions with customers, so they’re likely to experience mistreatment more frequently. That said, they’re likely to experience it at proportionally the same rate as higher-status workers, like hotel managers or professional service providers. And although higher-status employees may have less-frequent interactions with customers, often they may work with higher-status people who feel more entitled and have more perceived power, which, as we’ve seen, can lead to more rude behavior. We also know that people in jobs with ongoing relationships — such as salon stylists — expend less emotional labor, because they and their clients have more-authentic relationships. In contrast, with brief service encounters — such as those in food service — more emotional labor is needed because first impressions are so important to customers’ perception of the store or the company. What about tipped work specifically? You’ve done research about the connection between these positions — like waitstaff in a restaurant — and abusive behavior like sexual harassment. We’ve known for a while that restaurant workers’ dependence on tips creates a power difference that leads customers to mistreat them. We wanted to better understand the mechanisms behind that, so we asked restaurant employees what percentage of their pay comes from tips and how much they were required to smile and to hide any negative emotions. Then we looked to see if these factors were related to how often they experienced unwanted sexual behavior, like being touched on the arm or asked for their phone number. What we found is that depending on tips for income and being required to smile at customers increased someone’s incidence of sexual harassment by 30%. What role does race play? Are Black Americans more likely to experience customer incivility, for example? In a 2007 study, we actually found that white employees reported feeling more stress due to incivility than Black employees did — almost twice as much. But this kind of measure is subjective, and people who don’t tend to get mistreated might be more sensitive to small slights. However, when we looked at service workers in grocery stores and a retail store, we found that white employees who didn’t smile at customers tended to be given the benefit of the doubt and were viewed positively, while Black employees who didn’t smile were assumed to be less warm or actually hostile. For most of these studies, you focused on the U.S. What expectations do other countries have around how service employees should be treated? I don’t know of any research looking at global incivility broadly, but my guess would be that it really does differ culturally. In the U.S., looking away from someone and not smiling at them are seen as rude, while in Russia not smiling is normal and in Senegal looking away from someone of higher status is considered courteous. So, there are definitely social differences that could affect what is viewed as uncivil, such as the culture’s norms around emotional expression and social harmony. What customers expect of service workers is more universal, however. My colleagues and I did a study that looked at the expectations people have for interpersonal interactions in four countries: Singapore, Israel, France, and the U.S. We found that those expectations were different in each country when it came to relationships between coworkers and between friends, but with customers the expectation was always that employees would hide their true feelings and stay positive. There was some exception to this in France (which perhaps explains the stereotype of French retail employees’ being rude to Americans!), which has a more expressive culture and also views service work as a career — employees are typically paid a living wage without being dependent on tips. All told, what are the costs of incivility toward employees? When people are insulted, naturally they feel outraged or annoyed — and service workers have to control these emotions to do their jobs well. Our research has shown that this “surface acting” depletes us emotionally, cognitively, and physically, and many studies have found that this form of emotional labor is linked to job burnout and turnover. To research the impact on cognition and performance, we did a call center simulation in which we asked participants to perform tasks that required attention to detail, such as computing a 7% tax. In the course of their work, half of the participants were mistreated by a phone caller. Those participants made more errors than the ones who were left to do the work in peace. That negative effect was amplified if they were also expected to smile during their conversation with the rude caller. I was more surprised by our findings about the spillover that emotional labor at work can have into home life. In one study we found that the more exhausted hotel managers were feeling from faking positive emotions at work — if they had to deal with uncivil clients, for example — the more their spouses said the job interfered with their home life and wanted them to quit. In fact, the costs of emotional labor on marital partners were higher than the effects of other job stressors or negative personality types. In another study, we found that the more customer-facing employees faked positive emotions during their workday, the more likely they were to drink heavily after work. The negative effects of this emotional labor can create a perpetuating cycle. Something happens (maybe a customer is rude to you) and you have to fake a smile. Customers can tell when you’re just phoning it in; suddenly your interactions with them don’t go so well. That makes you more likely to make a mistake. In some new research I’m collaborating on, we find this spiraling effect builds up over time: Once employees start faking positive emotions with customers, it becomes harder and harder for them to get back to a place where they really mean that smile. What can organizations do to address this toll? Companies should consider offering all employees the kind of emotional training that is typically made available only to those in higher-status service roles, such as doctors. It focuses on two concepts: compassionate detachment, which is the ability to empathize with the customer or patient without taking in their negative emotions, and “deep acting,” in which the employee performs some action to bring their feelings in line with the expected work behavior, so they don’t feel like they’re just pasting on a smile. Deep acting might involve, for example, mentally reframing a rude customer as someone struggling with a difficult life event, which could help the employee’s smile be more authentic. Both of these techniques are shown to reduce the negative stress that comes from faking it, and they can even improve performance. But it’s not a great idea to put the burden of training on the people who are the target of mistreatment. Instead, it’s better to give employees autonomy — to give them a choice about how to respond to mistreatment from customers, whether that means faking a smile when doing so feels easy or being curt to someone whose behavior has crossed a line. Our research shows that the negative effects of faking a smile are reduced when someone chooses to do it, as compared with when they’re forced to. Ultimately, organizations need to show that they value their employees by paying them what they’re worth. In a series of field and experimental studies, we found that emotional labor did not feel so bad when people were financially compensated for that labor.

The Emotional Toll of Frontline Labor

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