Looking for Postmodern Public Administration Th eory 155
- Game face: Used in law enforcement to signify displays of toughness
- Compassion fatigue: Used in social work to describe the burnout resulting
from too much caritas - Emotion management: Focuses on the worker’s job to elicit the desired
emotional response from the citizen - Professional face: Used to describe the status shield that workers don to
distance themselves emotionally from the interaction; it is a roleplaying
function - Emotional chameleon: Th e ability to switch expressions of emotions on
and off - Spider sense: Th e ability to intuit the other’s emotional state
- Rapport: Th e ability to establish a deep understanding and communication
with the other - Emotional suppression: Th at which is required to disregard one’s own
feelings - Emotional mirror: Th e ability to refl ect and adopt the emotions of the
other - Emotional armor: Th e ability to gird oneself against one’s own emotional
response - Emotional equilibrium: Refers to maintaining a balance between extremes
of emotion - Emotional anesthesia: Th e lack of any emotional response; may occur aft er
prolonged exposure to extreme emotional stimuli - Emotional engagement: The ability to connect with the other and
empathize - Emotional mask: Th at which results when workers convincingly suppress
their own emotions in order to act as if they feel a contradictory emotion,
or no emotion (7)
As this list demonstrates, emotional labor is idiosyncratic and may not be
visible or detectable, thus rendering useless positivist methods based on hypoth-
esis testing. Newman, Guy, and Mastracci apply the abovementioned criteria to
the study of bureaucratic leadership, relying on interviews with street-level bu-
reaucrats in local and state level public organizations. Emotional labor requires
eff ort to eff ectively manage one’s emotion in an organizational setting, and for
an organization to be eff ective, such eff ort is also required of leaders.
Th ese scholars push the concept of emotional labor beyond theoretical con-
cerns to practical implications for bureaucrats and the training of future bureau-
crats. In a call to action for master of public administration (MPA) and master of
public policy (MPP) programs, Mastracci, Newman, and Guy (2010) argue that
curricula in such programs should be amended to include training in emotional
labor, as “competencies that support the inherent skills of person-to-person
transactions are the essence of public service” (131). Th is suggested programmatic