Introduction
The term emotion stands for feeling that someone contains. Emotion is the expression of happiness, sorrow, grief, anger, and other sentiments. The term emotional dissonance is a clash between actual emotions and the emotions that a person portrays at the moment. Emotional dissonance is hiding the sentiments. In our daily lives, we frequently utilize the word “emotion.” The phrase is merely used to refer to how individuals feel. Emotions truly refer to human feelings, which control mood. Emotion includes feeling, mood, temperament, personality, disposition, and motivation. Emotional dissonance is a negative feeling that arises when a person perceives an emotion as a conflict with their identity. This can be caused by continuous efforts to control their emotions. Everyone talks about the success of a person who achieved his goal, but no one talks about their hardships. People may often sometimes comment that it was their luck and fortune, but no one says that he or she really worked hard.
No social role encourages such ambitious moral aspirations as the lawyers, and no social role so consistently disappoints the aspirations it encourages.
This topic is very sensitive, which inculcates the emotions of people who really working hard. Most of you traveled via flight, or most of you have an obsession with sports. Just imagine an air attendant serving on the flight before passengers and suddenly she receives the message that something bad happened in her personal life but still she has to put a smile on her face and serve the services. Even athletes have to do this same when they are playing for the nation and get a call about uncertainties happening in their personal lives, but still, they have to play for the nation by hiding their pain. These are just examples. If we talk about hospitality industries, these things are common. Celebrities are always in the limelight. No matter the situation or how they struggle in their personal life, they have to keep a smile and pose for a picture. In the organization, there are people working from every corner of the world, and they carry different opinions, too; therefore, that can’t be aligned with organizational goals. By virtue of this blog, the author elaborates on the impact of emotional dissonance and its merits and demerits.
Impact of Emotional Dissonance
Rules, regulations, norms, principles, ethics, and manner of an organization make the employees work under pressure. Sometimes, hiding true temperament can cause depression, anxiety, sickness, infirmity, breakdown, and loneliness. If we talk about the hospitality industry, employees have to be patient. As we heard in the news channel, people boarding a flight abuse crew members due to frustration, but at the same time, crew members have to tackle the situation calmly and gracefully. At the same time, if we look at the road in India, people start fighting in case a vehicle is going to collide with each other, but it doesn’t so happen. They will start fighting for no reason. It has an impact on people’s behaviour and mental processes, which has an effect on both their physical and psychological well-being. It’s crucial to comprehend a number of emotional notions in order to understand emotion. These investigations have addressed a variety of topics, including the lack of cognition-based legal norms, juries’ application of the “right emotions” in their deliberations, and people’s capacity for reason when experiencing strong emotions. Realizing that emotion is an unavoidable part of the legal profession, some pundits have even turned the focus specifically against attorneys. Using Freudian theory, one author highlights how important it is for attorneys to identify and manage intense emotional responses to their clients in order to strengthen their relationships and prevent negatively impacting their representations.
It is not surprising that the legal community expects attorneys to act in an emotionless manner, not questioning their capacity to do so or the associated expenses. Emotion is “a corruptive force that must be carefully cabined so that it does not bias or influence logic and rational reasoning,” according to what is undoubtedly the dominant legal theory in the United States. Nonetheless, legal experts are gradually coming to see how important human psychology is to a deeper comprehension of legal actors and institutions, and as a result, they are beginning to anticipate a more significant place for emotion in the legal system.
Nowadays, mental health is a hot topic, and each one wants to keep their mental health good. Mental fatigue is causing serious health issues. In search of money for survival, people forget that they are human beings, not machines; therefore, they need to relax and live in peace. Health issues like trauma, hair fall, depression, panic attacks, anxiety, disrupted sleeping schedule, etc., are at their peak. Those who have no one to talk to and prefer to be silent and fight their own battles often take steps like suicide.
Emotional Labour
Researchers have long been interested in the topic of emotion in the workplace. The idea of feeling as a whole seems pointless in modern society, which is focused on scientific research, technological advancements, and inventions. This does not imply, however, that people lack feelings. Employees who interact directly with clients are required to show their emotions occasionally. The majority of service organizations where service providers interact directly with service recipients to provide services are the settings in which this phenomenon of emotional expression occurs. Emotional labor, also known as service encounter, is a word used to describe what goes on in the workplace and is a type of emotional management needed during buyer-seller interaction. It has been proven to be highly dominating, primarily in the service industries.
Emotional Dissonance – why it matters?
As a consequence of emotional labour in every profession, it results in a negative manner; people often start to be alcoholics or drug addicts. As a result, the majority of research on emotional labour focuses on its drawbacks, such as drug and alcohol misuse, migraines, burnout, low self-esteem, melancholy, cynicism, role alienation, and self-alienation. Nonetheless, some researchers have discovered that emotional labour improves work effectiveness, security, self-efficacy, happiness, and self-esteem. Various workers, including cashiers, salespeople, physicians, and lawyers, are required to carry out emotional labour, or “the psychological processes necessary to regulate organizationally desired emotions.
While most managers, administrators, and salespeople engage in some emotional labour, only a small percentage of these professions’ jobs—such as secretarial and service jobs—seem to require a lot of emotional labour. Lawyers establish themselves as members of a highly emotional labour-intensive profession. As a result, lawyers should be the focus of pertinent empirical research because they are vulnerable to the emotional labour costs mentioned earlier.
The lawyer’s work may be made more difficult by the requirement to act zealously in dealings with other parties to further an unpleasant client’s interests, rather than just being friendly. It, therefore, faces not only the reality that her behaviour is, as it were, “faking a smile” but also the constant concern that in spite of her natural instincts to the contrary, she might be causing injustices through her advocacy work. Even though the concept of injustice is admittedly ill-defined, it is nevertheless psychologically significant that attorneys are required to regularly give up their personal conceptions of justice in favour of a fervent advocacy requirement that embraces only the illusive and ethereal justice of the adversarial system that this process may harm.
Conclusion
With this emerging trend of emotional labour, it can be said that emotional dissonance should not be there. The natural and exact thing should be casted to others rather than being fake. The depth of this topic only shows the negative aspects that cause injury to the health of the victim. Moreover, this sensation can be decreased by doing workouts, meditation, yoga, and believing in spirituality. Also, it all can be done by living for ourselves rather than dying for others. In conclusion, emotional dissonance is a serious problem that affects lawyers’ effectiveness on the work and general well-being. It occurs when a lawyer’s personal feelings and the emotions they express in their professional capacity are at odds. Burnout, diminished job satisfaction, and emotional tiredness can result from this internal conflict.
Legal organizations must manage emotional dissonance by encouraging work-life balance, creating supportive work cultures, and offering emotional intelligence training. Lawyers can improve their overall performance at work and their mental health by recognizing and addressing emotional dissonance.
Authored by- Palak Singh, Law College Dehradun, Uttaranchal University