Topic > The Pros and Cons of Emotional Labor - 708

There are two main components that are mentioned when talking about emotional labor, which are deep action and surface action. The concepts of shallow action and deep action contain depth and are performed during emotional labor. According to Alicia Grandey, surface acting occurs when an individual presents an emotion on the outside without having a real connection to their true feelings. He states, “Surface acting is 'bad faith faking'… the employee conforms to the display rules to keep the job, not to help the customer or the organization.” (Grandey, 2003). Surface acting may seem easier to perform, but there are problems that appear when you have routine facades that don't always fit how you really feel. These problems are stress-related and make the individual unable to compartmentalize their true emotions once they stop working. This ultimately leads to emotional dissonance, causing a person to become unsure of their identity because they cannot find the boundary between their real and fake emotions. On the other hand, deep acting is very different because people try to contain the emotions that are asked of them during the work. This is a little harder to do because people need to understand how their emotions work and how the customer and organization want them to behave. As stated previously, Grandey believes this behavior is more genuine to the individual: “the intent, therefore, is to appear authentic to the audience; thus, deep action has been called 'good faith falsification' (Grandey,