The Effects of Emotional Labour Coach Education Interventions on Performance Football Coaches' Awareness of Their Own Emotions

Abstract

This study explores the impact that coach education interventions that were designed utilising Hochschild’s (1983) emotional labour theory had on coaches’ awareness of emotions within their coaching practice. The study intended to provide performance football coaches with the opportunity to explore the under-researched emotionally charged environment of football coaching (Potrac, Smith & Nelson, 2017), whilst also exploring emotion within their individual stories and highlighting future recommendations from undertaking this experience. Hochschild (1983) developed the phrase emotional labour which contained surface acting and deep acting, moreover, Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) proposed genuine expression as a further manifestation of emotional labour. Research has identified the importance of conducting educational workshops on emotions (Larner, Wagstaff, Thelwell & Corbett, 2017; Lee, Chelladurai & Kim, 2015), thus, the researcher utilised an intervention approach (Gilbert & Trudel, 2004), in the form of an introductory interview, four coach education workshops and two follow-up interviews. The findings from this study indicated that coaches retained a heightened awareness of emotions within their coaching and an informed understanding of emotional labour within their coaching practice