ارتباط استراتژی های تنظیم احساسات عاطفی با وقایع و احساسات منفی در محل کار

This study examined the use of specific forms of emotion regulation at work, utilizing Gross’s [Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology 2, 271–299] process-based framework of emotion regulation as a guiding structure. In addition to examining employee self-reported usage of these emotion regulation strategies, we assessed the types of discrete negative emotions and negative affective events associated with their use. Results demonstrated that employees reported using a wide variety of emotion regulation strategies, and that each strategy tended to align with a distinct set of discrete negative emotions and affective events. These findings support expanding the focus of emotion regulation strategies at work beyond the deep acting (i.e., changing feelings) and surface acting (i.e., changing expressions) distinction. The results also suggest that focusing on specific strategies, rather than categories of emotion regulation, could enhance understanding of how employees manage their emotions at work.

In her book, The Managed Heart, Hochschild (1983) formally articulated the idea that employees often get paid for controlling their feelings and emotional expressions, particularly when interacting with customers. Hochschild named this phenomenon emotional labor and identified two main strategies by which individuals manage their emotional displays: surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting has been described as “faking in bad faith” and involves expressing the organizationally-desired emotion and hiding an undesired emotion, whereas deep acting is considered to be “faking in good faith” as it involves changing one’s felt emotion so that the emotional expressions naturally match display requirements ( Grandey, 2000 and Rafaeli and Sutton, 1987). Although these emotion regulation strategies predict a variety of individual and organizational outcomes (e.g., Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002), some researchers have proposed that a broader, more detailed set of emotion regulation strategies (ERS) may better represent the ways in which individuals manage their emotions at work (e.g., Grandey & Brauburger, 2002). Guided by this view, we explored the use of several ERS derived from Gross’s (1998) process model of emotion regulation in the work context. We also examined the negative emotions and events that were associated with the use of these ERS. Below, we outline our research questions and present a study that examines them.