Wedding planners as brokers and therapists: how relational and emotional labour shape wellbeing

About the seminar topic

Prevailing portraits of brokers are oddly emotionless. We propose that emotional processes are inherent to brokers’ relational work. An inductive study revealed that wedding planners act as intermediary brokers between clients and weak ties (vendors), and as conciliatory brokers who manage clients’ conflicts with weak and strong ties (family members). Clients’ negative feelings often create the need for conciliatory brokering, which in turn requires wedding planners to manage clients’ emotions as well as their own. Wedding planners’ relational and emotional labour decreased their hedonic wellbeing, a finding corroborated in a cross-sectional survey of wedding planners. Follow-up experiments demonstrated that conciliatory brokering reduces hedonic wellbeing, yet bolsters psychological richness relative to intermediary brokering.

Our theory and findings:

• advance knowledge about the role of emotional processes in brokering
• illustrate the dynamic nature of service workers’ role breadth
• challenge narrow conceptualisations of weak ties’ impact by showing that hired professionals shape close relationships
• contribute to the ‘emotional labour as emotion regulation’ literature by underscoring professionals’ need to simultaneously regulate their own and others’ emotions
• show that relational work can simultaneously decrease and increase complementary aspects of employee wellbeing

Speaker bio

Nir Halevy is the Jagdeep and Roshni Singh Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. His research investigates:

• how individuals and groups make judgments and decisions
• the dynamics of social influence — in negotiations, organisational hierarchies, and social networks
• when and why individuals and groups cooperate or compete in social and organisational interactions

Register

No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.