Emotions online: Exploring knowledge workers’ emotional labour in a digital context in an agile IT company

Abstract

Digital technologies and new ways of organizing transform the way we experience work. Thus, this paper seeks to contribute to organizational behavior research by enhancing our understanding of the role of digital emotional labour (EL) among knowledge workers. We investigate the EL involved in digital communication practices among co-located knowledge workers employed in an agile IT-consultancy firm with a relatively flat hierarchy. Based on rich qualitative data, we analyse how the specific socio-material infrastructures of a democratic communication technology called ‘Flowdock’ give rise to EL (Hochschild, 1979, 1983). The study contributes theoretically by developing work on EL in a digital context by engaging with Oudshoorn’s (2009) term ‘digital proximity’. This implies opening up EL to a more dynamic and situated approach and contributing to the organizational research scrutinizing the EL of backstage professionals. The paper concludes that online communication creates new demands of managing emotions in relation to 4 themes key to agile organizing: 1) working as whole persons, 2) creating partnerships, 3) unclear decision making, and lastly 4) informal power dynamics. We discuss implications of the overall finding that knowledge workers face increased demands mixing social and technical skills.