Honest Broker

Honest Broker

Participants spoke of having to follow due process and be objective and non-judgemental regardless of their own thoughts and feelings in dealing with workplace problems. They described HR as the ‘conscience of the business’ and the ‘honest broker’ with a respon- sibility for ensuring transparency in decision-making processes and engendering feelings of trust:

In HR we are seen as the conscience of the business. You have to treat people without bias. You have to be the listening ear and the conscience of the business to be able to do that. (P4: Female, HRD Specialist)

1273 They were cognizant of the possible ramifications of their behaviour for themselves and

Emotional Challenges in the HR Role

the organization (e.g., risk of labour court proceedings; what they do can set a precedent for the future). The HR manager below highlighted this point when talking about a disciplinary meeting regarding an employee’s performance:

the game is based on factual information, and what happened and when and where and what actions were taken as a result so that in a sense the issues should be judged about the facts not how you feel about the facts so that in a sense if you display emotion regarding it then it comes out in an emotional way then it becomes a personalized issue and you can’t afford for it to be a personalized issue. I think in

a situation like that the process is always more forgiving of a manager because with HR, within the HR role, the onus is on HR to be the guardian of that fairness. (P8: Male, HR Manager)

Additionally there was a belief that responsibility for the organization’s ethical and moral climate lay firmly at the door of the HR function and that HR professionals themselves should be beyond reproach when it came to their behavioural displays:

A HR person has to be super-human, cleaner than clean, there is an expectation, at least I felt it, that you have to be beyond reproach and honest to the core because if you’re not who else is going to be? So there is a certain amount of standards enforced, it’s down to someone’s personal disposition in so far as no-one is 100% squeaky clean but you say as you do and do as you say. (P6: Male, HR Director)

This expectation to be an independent ‘honest broker’ in negotiating the employment relationship bears similarity to Storey’s (1992) contracts manager role and is under- pinned by occupational values of impartiality, neutrality, and fairness. Fulfilling this role required participants to control their emotion in order to remain calm and to be ‘middle of the road’:

you don’t show your emotions, you wouldn’t be middle of the road [if you did] show your emotions then that person would be able to say this is great she’s on my side now. (P7: Female HR Manager)

Highlighted here is the relational nature of the HR professionals’ emotional labour. Participants were not only concerned about the organizational consequences of their behaviour and decisions, they were acutely aware of the potential impacts on working relationships and future interactions they may have with the interaction partner. Thus they managed their emotions to ensure the maintenance of these relationships as the following quote demonstrates:

you’re trying to keep your calmness because you’re going to deal with people again and it’s not like an external person . . . these people you will meet again . . . you really can’t lose it. (P9: Female HR Generalist)

E. O’Brien and C. Linehan

We can already see the complexity of requirements in terms of emotional display norms and role enactment. A simplistic division of paternalistic care of employees versus control of staff behaviour is untenable. The control dimension applies as much, if not more, to the HR professional (‘has to be super-human’) as it does to other employees. Moreover the need to give controlled emotional displays (as a listening ear, the public face, being beyond reproach) functions in a variety of ways – to fulfil personal/professional stand- ards for the role, to boost credibility with other organizational stakeholders, to legitimize one’s position in external facing roles (‘the public face’), and perhaps most importantly to induce a particular kind of emotional response from the interaction partner, which of course is at the core of emotional labour. Role holders felt the need to ensure the other person in the interaction felt the process was fair and the outcome deserved and just, rather than feeling hostile, defiant, or angry. Control through a display of caring (whether that was authentic or not).