Topic: Essay on Employers’ Intervention in Workers’ Emotion
Instruction:
1) Under what conditions do employers intervene in workers’ emotion work to guarantee good performance in a store like TJ’s? What are the methods they can use in a store like TJ’s to get good performance from their workers, given the specific work situation (i.e., people do not need advanced degrees to get a job at TJ’s, so education is not particularly relevant to guarantee that workers are invested in doing emotion work). Please apply what is relevant for this specific case (front line service work in Trader Joe’s) to analyze the situation described in the NYT!
2) How do you think these methods are used or misused by managers in TJ’s (based on the article)? Keep in mind that employers/managers may not use the best methods to monitor behavior or encourage good performance (i.e., one that that is satisfying for everyone; see Lopez!); they may wrongly identify when and how they need to interfere. What might work better and why; i.e., what methods of monitoring/encouraging performance are the best match for the kind of work TJ’s frontline service workers do (explanations need to be based on the scholarship!)? If it helps, imagine you were hired to be a consultant to help managers figure out appropriate and effective ways to get workers do their best, based on what you know from scholarship.
3) Throughout your essay, make sure you consider all the relevant distinctions from Leidner’s work: selection of workers, interactions with customers, encounters vs. relationships, etc. to explain what happened and how managers can (and in many cases do!) use the methods at their disposal to achieve good service outcomes for all concerned.
4) reflect on the incident described in the article when managers used the
public address system to tell workers not to talk to one another AND when the manager
sarcastically told Nagel that there is no work in the locker room also through the system. What do such actions achieve (vs. what the managers thought they would) and why? Use any past relevant reading and Leidner’s analysis to explain. (It’s all sociology; no psychological explanations, please.)
Not what you think but based on the reading. I will send the article and reading separately.
No. of Pages: 4
