From Thinking to Feeling: The Impact of Technology in Reshaping Professionals’ Identity and Their Skills

Lunch Seminar in presence

Building BL26 – Room 0.19 (ground floor)
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
Via R. Lambruschini, 4/B

Lara Carminati
University of Twente, Netherlands

Abstract:

In today’s workplaces, the unprecedented implementations of disruptive technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), have driven a switch from a ‘thinking economy’ to a ‘feeling economy’. Thanks to its ability to perform cognitive functions typically associated with human minds, AI has been taking over many analytical and thinking tasks. For many professionals, this switch entails reshaping who they are at work (i.e., their work identity), as well as placing a new emphasis on the “soft”, people-focused aspects of their job, such as socio-emotional skills. And yet, how this reshaping unfolds at the individual level and how these people-focused aspects impact team and organisational outcomes still remain unexplored.

During the seminar, Dr Carminati will present the preliminary results of her work-in-progress research, with a specific focus on the socio-emotional aspects (e.g., conflict management and emotional intelligence) and their consequences for team performance. She is currently exploring these aspects through video observations and physiological data as part of her HumanTech project.

Dr Lara Carminati is an Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Change Management at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, where she teaches in the Business Administration and Honours programmes. The red thread throughout her research is identity. Specifically, Dr Carminati is exploring 1) the macro, meso, and micro factors influencing “who we are” at work, especially vis-á-vis disruptive technologies, such as AI; and 2) socio-emotional (non)verbal behaviours expressed during team members’ interactions through video observations and physiological measures. For advancing this second topic, Dr Carminati was awarded funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and a HumanTech visiting scholarship from Politecnico di Milano. Her work has been published in different journals, among which Applied Psychology, Production, Planning & Control, Frontiers in Psychology, Current Psychology, and Healthcare Management Review.