Loneliness at work , service failures and emotional management decisions to heated customer complaints, are some of the discussion topics at the Second Brisbane Symposium on Emotions and Worklife.
“It’s looking at research that’s been conducted around Australia on emotion in the workplace and marketplace,” Symposium program chair Dr Rebekah Bennett said.
This year’s symposium, coordinated by The University of Queensland, will be held in the General Purpose North Building 3 (building no. 39A, opposite the Colin Clark building) at St Lucia on Friday [November 26] from 9am to 5pm.
Dr Bennett said emotional intelligence – how people manage their own emotions and read and respond to other’s emotions, was a theme of the symposium.
She said the discussion would be from a business perspective to improve job satisfaction, reduce turnover, increase organisational commitment, keep happy customers and resolve problems.
Managers who told staff to leave their problems at the door, did so at their own peril.
“You can ignore the emotions and they’ll work against you or you can learn to manage them in the workplace and make it a more productive workplace.”
A host of expert business researchers from UQ, the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, Griffith University, Bond University and Deakin University will present.
Among the UQ presenters is Professor Neal Ashkanasy from the UQ Business School who has teamed up with Claire Ashton-James from the University of New South Wales.
They concluded that decision-making in top management is not a cold process of rational thought but affected by the states of the managers.
UQ PhD student Peter Noordink found similar results in the finance industry.
His results showed stock traders often had little time to evaluate risk strategies while on the trading floor and often made split-second decisions based on emotions and intuition.
A study of customer complaints by Dr Bennett also found emotional decisions spilt over to consumers.
Using data from the Office of Fair Trading and the Financial Services Industry, she and her colleagues Professor Charmine Hartel of Deakin University and Kay Russell of
SJP Insurance Services, found consumers complaining about bad service often swung between rational and emotional responses.
She said managers had to continually check-in with consumers otherwise solutions to bad service could do further harm.
Other UQ research includes Jean Althoff and Marie Dasborough`s work on facial expressions in top teams and the impact of emotional intelligence on the health and job satisfaction of shiftworking nurses by Dr Anne Pisarski.
For more information on the conference visit: http://www.business.uq.edu.au/research/emonet/emotions_worklife/index.html
Abstracts of symposium papers can be viewed from this afternoon at http://www.business.uq.edu.au/research/emonet/emotions_worklife/abstracts.html
Media: contact Dr Bennett (phone: 0418 987 598, 3365 8283, email: r.bennett@business.uq.edu.au) or Miguel Holland at UQ Communications (phone: 3365 2619, email: m.holland@uq.edu.au)
