An Alternative to Bureaucratic Impersonality and Emotional Labor Bounded Emotionality at The Body Shop

For long time the problems of controlling, managing and making emotional expression of the employees work for the benefit of their business organization were beyond the interest of leading management researchers. In the article An Alternative to Bureaucratic Impersonality and Emotional Labor Bounded Emotionality at The Body Shop the specialists discuss the specifics of emotion management, approaches of feminist organizational theorists to the problems of emotional expression of the employees and also focus on other issues related to emotional control and bounded emotionality in modern organizations.

On the basis of Perrow’s concept about three types of control (direct and strict control, less direct control and liberal slight control), the authors of the article defined three ideal types of business organizations: traditional bureaucracy, normative and feminist structures.

At that, the traditional bureaucracy is characterized with high level of control, strict rules and hierarchical authority; normative organizations are described as the structures which have less obtrusive control, delegation of power to lower-level managers and participative leadership; and, finally, feminist organizations are supposed to have the lowest level of control, consensual models of decision making and rotating system of leadership.

Besides, traditional bureaucratic organizations are oriented on minimizing the effect of personal issues of the employees on their work, though sometimes some emotional labor can be used in bureaucratic or normative organizations, such as airlines, restaurant business, etc. However, feminist organizations as the structures which are more oriented on improving personal well-being of the employees, usually employ emotional expressions for own benefit.

The majority of feminist theorists agrees that high level of emotional control is not a stimulating factor for good personal performance of the female employees, because women are generally more emotional than men, therefore, bounded emotionality can cause different negative reactions and affect the performance of women at work.