Highway Happiness or Road Rage? Goal Disruptive Events, Communication Dynamics, and Truckers’ Fuel Consumption

Co-Authors: Brosi, Rivkin, Leopold, Shaw and Fransoo

This research examines truck drivers’ emotions to understand how organizations can reduce carbon emissions. Based on affective events theory and functional emotion theory, we examine the influence of truck drivers’ emotional reactions to goal-disruptive events, i.e., anger and happiness, on fuel consumption. Furthermore, we test alternative theoretical perspectives, i.e., the buffering and undoing effect of positive emotions versus empathetic emotional congruence, to understand how the communication between drivers and dispatchers changes truck drivers’ emotional reactions. Daily examining truck drivers over the course of four weeks and combining survey data with archival data on communication and driving behavior, we show that both anger and happiness in reaction to goal-disruptive events increase fuel consumption by changing driving behavior. Furthermore, our data lends support to the empathetic perspective on driver-dispatcher communication. Positive driver-dispatcher communication strengthened both the negative relationship between goal-disruptive events and happiness as well as the positive relationship between goal-disruptive events and anger. These results show that organizations can address truck drivers’ emotions to reduce carbon emissions by lowering goal-disruptive events and fostering emotionally congruent communication between drivers and dispatchers.

Prisca Brosi is Associate Professor of Human Resource Management at Kühne Logistics University. She studied industrial engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), worked for three years as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and did her Doctorate in 2012 directly followed by her Habilitation studies at the Technical University Munich (TUM). Her research focuses on demonstrating the influence of emotions in organizations across different contexts and outcomes including leadership, operations, and sustainability. It was published in outlets such as Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Human Resource Management.