No abstract

Emotional reactions and transmissions are crucial to host-tourist interaction yet lacking in research, particularly from the host viewpoint. To deepen understanding of host-tourist interaction, this study took a host perspective to examine emotional contagion from tourists to hosts. By adopting video-vignette based interaction scenarios and cutting-edge techniques (e.g., FaceReader), a real-time multi-modal investigation was undertaken to reveal mechanism underlying emotional contagion of Hong Kong residents from Mainland Chinese tourists. Results theoretically consolidated the dual-process mechanism underpinning automatic emotional contagion and empirically verified an Emotional Contagion Model (ECM) from tourists to hosts. The compelling effects of mimicry, interaction context and stereotypes explained the emotional convergence and divergence between hosts and tourists. The study extended the knowledge boundary of host-tourist interaction to micro-level interpersonal emotional connection. Moreover, the verified ECM theoretically advances emotional contagion mechanism in the social psychology literature. Practical guidelines for host-tourist relation management and sustainable destination development were provided.

This paper aims to explore the impacts of stress on employees’ job performance with a specific focus on Hawasa Industrial Park in Ethiopia. Data was collected through key interviews, household survey and field observation. For the survey, 394 randomly selected respondents were interviewed. The results indicate that the dependent variable (job performance) related positively with education (EDU), working experience (WEX) and age (Age). The relation between gender and job performance is negative but insignificant since the value of betta coefficient is greater than 0.05. Based on this result, working experience showing a higher value (r= .438, p<.01) followed by education (r= .114, p<.05) and age (r= .032, p<.05). We identified that workload (18%), conflict at work (29%), role ambiguity (20%) and resource inadequacy (33%) are reported as the major causes of stress in the organization. Hence, this study suggests awareness creation campaigns for all the working staffs including the management are necessary to at least reduce stress and low performance of organization.