A review of emotion regulation and development of a framework for emotion regulation in the workplace

Abstract

Research in industrial and organizational psychology demonstrates that the regulation of negative emotions in response to both organizational stressors and interpersonal workplace interactions can result in functional and dysfunctional outcomes (Coˆte´, 2005; Diefendorff, Richard, & Yang, 2008). Research on the regulation of negative emotions has additionally been conducted in social psychology, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, health psychology, and clinical psychology. A close reading of this broader literature, however, reveals that the conceptualization and use of the term ''emotion regulation'' varies within each research field as well as across these fields. The main focus of our chapter is to make sense of the term ''emotion regulation'' in the workplace by considering its use across a broad range of psychology disciplines. We then develop an overarching theoretical framework using is ambiguating terminology to highlight what we argue are the important constructs involved in the process of intrapersonal emotion generation, emotional experience regulation, and emotional expression regulation in the workplace (e.g., emotional intelligence, emotion regulation strategies, emotion expression displays). We anticipate this chapter will enable researchers and industrial and organizational psychologists to identify the conditions under which functional regulation outcomes are more likely to occur and then build interventions around these findings.