At the Heart of Policing: Emotional labor among police officers

During my work as a police officer, I encountered many emotional demanding situations in which my colleagues and I often seemed to act unfelt emotions or suppressed emotions that would better not be displayed at that particular moment. For instance, during my first weeks of duty I wondered how police officers could stay seemingly untouched while being confronted with drunk and offensive people. One colleague once told me: “I don’t take it personally, it’s part of the job and so it doesn’t frustrate me anymore”. At other times, it turned out to be proper to display empathy although this emotion was not always genuinely felt (anymore). In contrast, when interrogating a criminal I learned that sometimes acting friendly may help to acquire important information. Otherwise, unfelt emotions such as anger had to be displayed in order to correct an offender and to prevent an interaction from escalating. These anecdotes illustrate the benefits of acting emotions during the work of police officers. Moreover, emotions form an inherent part of people’s (work) lives on a daily basis. Not surprisingly, the management and display of emotions in the workplace receives considerable attention as they may influence both individual well-being and organizational outcomes. The term emotional labor was first introduced by Hochschild (1983) and refers to how employees regulate their emotions as part of the work role and the consequences of doing so. The types of emotions that a company considers appropriate to show to clients are often part of its policy and are part of the company’s socalled display rules (Ekman, 1973; Grandey, 2000). To adhere to these display rules, employees may engage in emotional labor by suppressing felt emotions or displaying emotions that are different from their genuinely experienced emotions (Hochschild, 1983). This emotion regulation technique, termed surface acting, may lead to emotional dissonance, which refers to a state of discrepancy between felt and displayed emotions. Accumulating evidence from the past three decades reveals that both surface acting and emotional dissonance are detrimental to employee well-being (cf. Ashfort & Humphrey, 1993; Mesmer-Magnus, DeChurch, & Wax, 2012; Zapf, 2002)

Dyadic support exchange and work engagement: An episodic test and expansion of self-determination theory

According to the self-determination theory (SDT), individuals flourish when they satisfy their psychological needs. We expand this proposition by testing whether employees satisfy their own needs and improve their own work engagement by providing support to their co-workers. Moreover, we argue that it matters when and to whom the support is provided. We contend that the indirect effect of autonomously motivated support provision on the provider’s work engagement through the provider’s need satisfaction is stronger (1) during episodes that the receiver’s emotional demands are high (vs. low), (2) when the receiver’s learning goal orientation is high (vs. low), or (3) when the receiver’s prove performance goal orientation is low (vs. high). We collected data among 97 dyads of police officers (N = 194 participants) during two time blocks on one working day (N = 227–491 episodes). Multi-level analyses confirmed that support provision related positively to the provider’s episodic work engagement through episodic need satisfaction. As hypothesized, this indirect relationship was stronger during emotionally demanding episodes, or when the receiver was characterized by a low prove performance goal orientation. Learning goal orientation did not moderate the support provision–work engagement relationship. These findings expand SDT by indicating that individuals satisfy their own daily needs by providing support, and by showing that it matters when and to whom support is provided. Practitioner points: Providing help benefits both the beneficiary and the helper Managers should encourage the daily exchange of social resources between employees The exchange of social support between co-workers is crucial when employees face demanding clients