The impact of two organizational interventions on the health of service sector workers

Studies focusing on interactive service work that involves face-to-face interactions between employees and customers/clients have shown that employees tend to show symptoms of job dissatisfaction, stress, and emotional exhaustion because they are expected to display or suppress certain emotions in the performance of their jobs. To meet the health challenges and reduce sickness absenteeism among employees in this sector, two organizational interventions were implemented among service workers employed by the municipality and in a shopping mall in a medium-sized Norwegian city. In a field experiment, the authors evaluated the effect of this type of intervention on employee health. The experiment combined survey measures (pre- and post-intervention) with observations and unstructured interviews. The survey data showed positive changes on only two of the measured variables among the shopping mall employees, and no effect on the municipal employees. This article focuses on the qualitative data, which show how constraints related to time and to interactional and organizational practices impeded full involvement of the employees during implementation of the interventions. The authors discuss the results from the perspective of the general challenges of implementing interventions in the service sector.