TRABALHO EMOCIONAL E TRABALHO SECRETARIAL: CONTEXTOS E DESAFIOS

Abstract

Work rules are constantly changing (Goleman, 1998) and today workers need not only the experience and knowledge they have, but also people skills. Hochschild (2003) states that the emotional state of an employee is a significant part of all the accomplished service and that the companies started demanding expressions of emotion accordin to customer's demand. The concept of Emotional Labour (EL) enlightens the notion of how an occupation is experienced by the workers and how workers are managing their emotions in order to meet organisational and occupational needs. For Morris and Feldman (1996), the emotion is a resource available to the organisation and, because of that, has to be studied with emphasis in the business sector. In this research, the empirical focus is on the Executive Secretary, that according to Castro, Lopes and Sena (2008) the profile follows the changes and the expectations, demanding a flexible and pro-active attitude. Bearing that discussion in mind, this study main objective is to analyse EL and secretarial work. This qualitative study presents an empirical contribution as it was based on four in-depth interviews carried out with secretaries who work in a federal university in Brazil. The results indicated that the secretaries perform a lot of EL. Due to their labour interactive and multi-task nature, the effects of the organisational changes as well as the adaptation to new demands within the employment environment, the secretaries performs tasks that go beyond their employment requirements.