Keynote Speaker

Dr. Markus Groth is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Organisation & Management at the Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales. He earned his Ph.D. in Management from the University of Arizona in 2001. Markus' research interests focus on various service management topics with the aim of unravelling the complexities of customer service. His work focuses on managing service excellence and the role of emotions in the workplace and explores the link between employee experiences of work and service quality experiences of the customers they serve, the behavioural and emotional components of service interactions, as well as the strategies organisations employ to form and maintain relationships with their customers. His work has been published in journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Management, and Academy of Management Executive. In addition, he has consulted with both private and public organisations on human resource management issues and currently holds two research grants from the Australian Research Council in order to explore work design and emotional labour issues in the call centre and heath care sectors.

For further information on Dr. Groth's research please Click Here to visit his website.

Keynote Presentation

Taking Emotions to Task: 25 Years of Emotional Labour Research:
What Have We Learned, Where Are We Heading?

Abstract
Emotional labour refers to the regulation of one’s emotions and emotional displays as part of the work role. The essential idea is that employees must conform to emotional display rules regardless of their felt emotions, and this often entails using emotion regulation strategies. Ever since sociologist Hochschild (1983) coined the term in her seminal book, The Managed Heart, interest in emotional labour has increased substantially. Now, in the age of the “affective revolution” in OB (Barsade, Brief, & Spataro, 2003), the growth of the number of articles on emotions in OB has exceeded the growth in other mainstream topics in the past few years. In this presentation I will provide a brief overview of ‘what we have learned’ from 25 years of research on emotional labour. I will provide a background in the development of the emotional labour concept and its challenges. Furthermore, I will summarise major findings and major theories underpinning emotional labour research and examine to what extent they are consistent or contradictory. Equally important, I will address the question of ‘what we still need to learn’ by identifying and highlighting the emerging trends in the emotional labour literature and providing an agenda for future emotional labour research.