Do you curse when driving?
In her talk, Prisca will illuminate how emotions affect our driving behaviours and in consequence carbon emissions. Building on affective events theory and functional emotion theory, she will discuss whether truck drivers’ emotional reactions (i.e., anger and happiness) to goal-disruptive events relate to driving behaviours and thereby fuel consumption. Furthermore, Prisca will discuss alternative theoretical perspectives to understand how communication between drivers and dispatchers modulates truck drivers’ emotional reactions.
To answer those questions she combined an experience sampling survey of truck drivers’ daily emotions across four weeks, archival electronic messaging information on driver-dispatcher communication, and onboard computer data recordings of driving behavior.
Interestingly, both anger and happiness in reaction to goal-disruptive events increase fuel consumption through changes in driving behavior. Furthermore, positive empathetic communication seems to mitigate the negative impacts of emotional responses on driving behavior.
In consequence organizations can reduce fuel consumption and, consequently, carbon emissions by minimizing goal-disruptive events, managing employee emotions, and fostering emotionally congruent communication between drivers and dispatchers.
About the speaker
Dr. Prisca Brosi is an Associate Professor of Human Resource Management at the KLU Hamburg, Germany. She studied industrial engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and worked for three years as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. Dr. Brosi did her Doctorate on positive emotions in organizations directly followed by her Habilitation studies at the Technical University Munich (TUM). Her research focuses on emotions in organizations examining the consequences of both the experience and the expression of discrete emotions. She applies this theoretical lens to different organizational contexts beyond human resource management including operations management, humanitarian operations, and entrepreneurship.
