The Impact of Emotional Demand and Job Demand on Emotional Exhaustion: A Study on Sales Executives of Automobile Showrooms

IntroductionOrganizations are witnessing rampant changes due to the increasing business complexity, competition and uncertainty in business environment. As the business becomes more complex, organizations are continually challenged to engage in activities to increase their performance. An organization needs to understand and translate customer requirement to meet the challenges. Many industries are faced with unique challenges which include difficulty in attracting customers. In order to thrive in the competition, organizations have changed their focus on service. Organizations in all sectors are improving their service interactions with the customers. In this changing context, employees are desired to express the emotion that satisfies their customers. This is being considered as an important HR system that can generate business value and contribute to organizational growth and effectiveness. Increased competition among service sector raises the need to understand the factors involved in increasing the quality of service to the customer. This study has helped in finding two factors that will improve the quality of service. The two factors are emotional demand and job demand which are the major determinants in improving the quality of service provided to the customers.Providing quality service is a collaborative effort of workers from different disciplines and often involves high degree of adaptability. Managing performance of workers may, thus, involve several intricate challenges. One of the challenges faced by an employee is to manage emotions as per the demands of an organization. An organization shapes employees' emotion and emotional display, which is known as emotional demand (Hochschild, 1983) It is an emotionally charged interaction at work which is considered to be an important source of job strain. Emotionally demanding conditions require energy investment that may exhaust employees' resource reservoir. When energy is depleted, job strain is likely to occur. Acts that require self control use up this limited energy and exhaust it. It is different from emotional intelligence in that it perceives and understands emotional information and regulates emotions (Salovey and Mayer, 1990).Job demand refers to those physical, social or organizational aspects of the job that require sustained physical or mental effort and are therefore associated with certain physiological and psychological costs (Bakker et al. 2003) High job demands are likely to result in strained reactions which in turn may lead to an increase in emotional exhaustion. Emotional demand refers to those aspects of the job that require sustained emotional effort because of interactional contact with clients (de Jonge and Dormann, 2003) In this study, the authors have focused on two different demands together, namely, job demand and emotional demand and their simultaneous effects on emotional exhaustion.Literature ReviewDue to increased competition among the service organizations, there is a need to understand the factors which contribute to the quality of customer service. In service organizations, the role of employees' emotion is the major determinant of customer service quality (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996; and Groth et al. 2009) The organization's emotional display rules specify and prescribe the expression of emotion to the customers which are the key components of employees' performance (Morris and Feldman, 1996) Nevertheless, the service employees may not always be in a good mood to express the positive emotions prescribed by organization that contribute to the efficacy of the organization (Morris and Feldman, 1996; and Grandey, 2003).Emotion is a continuous process that develops from one's personal situation (Schutz and DeCuir, 2002) It is a major factor in people's life and is linked with their wellbeing. The emotions are basically happiness, anger and fear. One's ability to use the emotion in service towards a customer demands a high level of emotional balance and intelligence.