Anything but normal: emotional labor and stress during international assignments to terrorism-endangered countries

Seminar
This event has now finished.
  • Date and time: Wednesday 17 January 2024, 1pm to 2.30pm
  • Location: CL/A/103, Church Lane Building, Campus West, University of York (Map)
  • Audience: Open to staff, students (postgraduate researchers only)
  • Admission: Free admission, booking not required

Event details

Terrorism threatens international business activities of multinational enterprises (MNE) and exposure to terrorism evokes strong emotions among expatriates working for these MNEs. To regulate their emotions and ensure work functioning, emotional labor theory suggests expatriates can apply different emotional labor strategies: deep acting (actively altering unwanted emotions trying to truly feel desired emotions) or surface acting (acting out desired emotions without really feeling them). Integrating emotional labor theory and resource depletion perspective, we develop a theoretical model linking these strategies to stress during assignments and introduce terrorism as a boundary condition governing the proposed differential effects. Investigating emotional labor is important for MNC research as the resulting stress can render expatriate assignments unproductive and increase turnover – jeopardizing the success of the foreign operation. Using data from a weekly diary study, we find that in the absence of terrorism surface acting unfolds a stress enhancing effect which is in line with research in normal work settings; however, when terrorism occurs the effect of surface acting on stress is mitigated. For deep acting the effects are insignificant. Our findings provide a new perspective on emotion regulation and stress during international assignments and theoretically advance literature on managing staff in terrorism endangered countries.
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Professor Katharina Bader, School for Business and Society

Professor Katharina Bader is Chair in International HR Management. Before joining the University of York, she held permanent and visiting positions in Canada, Germany, India, Japan and the UK. Her research focusses on global mobility and equality, diversity and inclusion in organisations. Her studies have been published in leading academic journals such as Journal of Organizational Behavior, Human Resource Management, Work Employment and Society and The International Journal of Human Resource Management and she has received several international awards for her research. She is an Associate Editor at Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – An international Journal and Asian Business and Management. Moreover, she serves on the Editorial Board of The International Journal of Human Resource Management. Having worked as a leadership development manager in a multinational company, she also brings industry experience and has conducted various collaborative and co- productive research projects with industry partners and non-profit organisations.