Why do people engage in interpersonal emotion regulation at work?

Abstract

People in organizations often try to change the feelings of those they interact with. Research in this area has to date focused on how people try to regulate others’ emotions, with less attention paid to understanding the reasons why. This paper presents a theoretical framework that proposes three overarching dimensions of motivations for interpersonal emotion regulation at work, relating to the extent to which regulation is motivated by autonomy (intrinsic vs. extrinsic), relatedness (prosocial vs. egoistic), and competence (performance- vs. pleasure-oriented). Combining these dimensions suggests eight possible categories of motives that underlie interpersonal emotion regulation. The framework enables new predictions about how motives influence the types of emotions elicited in others, the strategies employed, and the effectiveness of interpersonal emotion regulation in organizations.