Managing the emotions of civil servants: Attendance or service

The descriptive, qualitative and autoethnographic study looked at the role of emotions in serving the public in state agencies and focused on the sociology of emotions, behavioural patterns (display rules), feeling rules and expression rules adopted by civil servants, based mainly on studies by the author Arlie Russel Hochschild on professions in the service sector. The results were analysed using discourse analysis methodology and revealed the manifestation of the four techniques used to manage emotions: body work, surface acting, deep acting and cognitive work. The results suggest that affective processes can interfere with motivation, behaviour, information processing, choices, service and performance evaluations of civil servants due to the high level of involvement and absorption of emotional load, which is characteristic of our population. The relevance of the study lies in the concern to study emotions in the Brazilian organisational context, since the studies found are from outside Brazil.