Emotional Management in the Spanish Workplace. Quantitative analysis through the construction of an Index of Emotional Quality at Work and its link with the social structure

Abstract

The organisation of work, located in the post-Fordist paradigm, stresses the emotional aspects of employee-client interaction processes. This emphasis arises from the shift in the productive structure towards growth in service activities in which interpersonal relationships are key factors. In this "new culture", the organisation is conceived as a ‘sentient’ environment and emotional work captures the interest of researchers and social scientists who analyse the role played by emotions in occupations and organisational culture (Zapf, 2002, Grandey 2000, 2015, Seymour and Sandiford 2005, Bolton 2000, Wharton,
2009, Totterdell, and Holman, 2003). Most related research has focused on qualitative case studies of workers in the service sector (Steinberg and Figart, 1999) — an approach that limits the inferences one can make and hinders one in linking findings to the social structure. The aim of our research is to expand this field of analysis and explore the link between emotional management and social structure. That is why we used a quantitative methodology, for which purpose we built an Emotional Quality Index in the Workplace (EQIW), allowing us to measure the emotional quality of workers in Spain and analyse their relationship with the three key structural variables: social class; occupation; gender. Here, we used data from the European
Working Conditions Survey (2015). The results show that there are significant differences in the emotional management of work by occupation, social class and gender, verifying that there is indeed a link between the EQIW and the social structure.