Emotional Conflicts and Coping Strategies: The Case of Life Insurance Agents in China

Abstract

Through analysing Chinese life insurance agents’ emotional conflicts and coping strategies, this study tries to reveal organization and work’s impact on the agents. Because organizational and working rules are often inconsistent with social norms and personal feelings, life insurance agents easily experience negative emotions and conflicts. Various strategies that make efforts to solve this kind of conflict may trigger off some new emotional problems, and they probably make agents’ emotional conflicts worse as well. In a way, emotional alienation has become a necessity for service workers in the post-industrial society, and that means individuals’ emotions and regulations are subject to the demand of organization and work, but deviate from themselves and social rules.