Emotional Labour and Bank Employees Dissatisfaction: An Overlooked Perspective in Public Sector Banks

Abstract

Emotional labour is the management of feelings to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display. Put differently, it is an expression of required emotions by the employees (emotions that comply with the organisational display rules) during their interpersonal transactions at work. The existing literature confirms the effects (positive/ negative) of emotional labour on professional outcomes of the individuals that is job satisfaction. A bank employee, like other service-delivery professionals, exercises physical, mental and emotional labour. The present study acknowledges the concept of emotional labour in relation to banking industry in general and bank employees, in particular, as they contribute significantly to the economic development of India. Therefore, an attempt has been made to study the association between different strategies of emotional labour and job-satisfaction level of public-sector bank employees (200), as the researcher could not ascertain the same in the consulted literature. The findings drawn through correlation, regression and descriptive statistics show that surface acting and emotional suppression, and emotional consonance turned out to be the main influencers of job satisfaction. The study contributes an understanding towards emotional labour as one of the requisites (R2 67.5%) to attain job satisfaction with specific reference to employees serving the Indian banking industry (public-sector banks). This study shall be completed in three phases starting with the employees of public sector banks, followed by private sector banks, and foreign banks. However, the present paper focuses mainly on the employees of public sector banks. The paper concludes with findings, suggestions and implications along with a suggestive framework.