Emotional Intelligence: Spare a Thought for Customer-Facing Roles
According to Markus Groth, an associate professor at the Australian School of Business, employees who have to manage their emotions when dealing with difficult customers are providing emotional labour. It is distinct from physical or cognitive labour and bosses need to take this work and the effects it can have on workers into account. Research into parking officers shows they can be more productive if they display authentic emotions in abusive situations, but other occupations require a different emotional intelligence. There's a need for experiential training and managers should take time to debrief with staff after critical incidents.

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Asian Partners: How Korea is Overlooked in Coming Fourth
South Korea – officially the Republic of Korea – has Asia's fourth-largest economy and is Australia's fourth-largest trading partner, a relationship in which Australia enjoys a significant surplus. Yet Korean was omitted as a priority language in the Australian government's future blueprint, the Asian Century White Paper. Chung-Sok Suh, from the Korea Research Institute at the Australian School of Business, is at the heart of efforts to expand collaboration with our affluent regional neighbour. He notes existing ties but sees plenty of scope for improvement and further opportunities. Companies need to understand that Korean business culture is different to that of Japan or China.

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Productivity in the Modern Office: A Matter of Impact
More than 50 years after management guru Peter Drucker first wrote about the difficulty of defining and measuring the productivity of knowledge workers, management experts say many companies still do a poor job of it. To get a better gauge of how much employees are accomplishing, experts say managers need to remember that quality is often as important, if not more so, than quantity, and that blanket policies rarely remedy such a highly individualised issue.

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Adobe's Shift to the Cloud: Is This the Start of a Trend?
Adobe, the leading software company targeting creative professionals, is exiting the shrink-wrap software business in favour of subscription-based software and online "cloud" services. While perhaps painful at first, the business model change will be ultimately beneficial for consumers and Adobe alike, and other software companies are likely to follow, say experts at Wharton.

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Accounting in Progress: Have Rising Standards Improved Earnings Quality in China?
A lack of transparency in the accounts of listed Chinese companies has long sounded warning bells for outside investors, particularly in the context of an insider economy with weak legal enforcement and low investor protection. But China has made great strides in adopting international financial accounting standards during the past 20 years. Researchers from the Australian School of Business have found this progress has improved earnings quality, though not across the board. In some cases, improving quality in one aspect of earnings has been at the cost of sacrificing another. Poor corporate governance is still a pressing concern.

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The Future of Green Building May Be Closer than You Think
Buildings that consume no outside energy are being developed today – with existing technology. So much innovative work has been done in green building that a growing number of people are now shifting their focus from means to ends. Their goal: Create buildings that generate as much energy as they need to operate, called net-zero energy buildings (NZEB). Efforts to achieve NZEB are under way in all sectors – government, academia, the military, not-for-profits and business – and at all scales:  residential, community and commercial. While it is still early days, the results have been impressive.

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Research Roundup: Foreign Diversification, Social Comparisons and Consumer Identity
Is investing in foreign stocks still a good strategy for offsetting risk and boosting returns in your portfolio? How do social comparisons impact on the different dimensions of trust that people can have for each other? How can companies use emotional cues to convey a particular identity to consumers? Wharton professors Karen Lewis, Maurice Schweitzer and Patti Williams, respectively, examined these issues – and what they mean for business and consumers – in recent research papers.

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