I currently work within the Organisational Psychology Group at Manchester Business School, and my primary research interests are in employee gentleness and emotion at work, as well as job design and job quality.  My work has been published in a wide variety of journals, including Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Applied Psychology, Occupational Health Psychology and Academy of Management Annals, and I have been awarded two best paper prizes, one in Human Relations (2013) and one on the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (2105-16).  I am on the editorial board of Human Relations and the Journal of Business and Psychology. 

My primary research interests are in employee gentleness and emotion at work, as well as job design and job quality.

The current focus of my work is to understand the nature of employee gentleness, which can be broadly defined as a soft, slow, warm and involving approach to care giving, and how it is shaped by the organisational context.  At present this work is funded by a two-year Lord Alliance Research Grant and involves conducting two ethnographic studies of employee gentleness in social care settings.  The aim of this research is to further enrich our understanding of employee gentleness and to provide greater insights into the management strategies that shape its use.  

For more information on this research project, please visit:

https://www.mbs.ac.uk/research/funded-projects/alliance-projects/employee-gentleness-in-care-settings/

My work on affect and emotion at work concentrates on how employees regulate their own emotions (emotional labour) and the emotions of others (interpersonal emotion regulation).  Recent studies have focused on establishing the effects of interpersonal emotion regulation between driving instructors and learner drivers and between PhD supervisors and students.

The research I conduct on job quality focuses primarily on understanding why the quality of job design varies between organisations and between countries.  For example, recent research in this area has examined whether cross national variation in job quality is a result of national differences in institutional regimes, and whether job design across Europe is becoming similar across countries (diverging) or more dissimilar (diverging).  Results suggest that  the quality of job design is getting worse in most European countries except Nordic countries, i.e., that it is diverging between countries.