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The authors investigate when and why a subordinate's expressive suppression facilitates workplace creativity, building on the conservation of resources theory and considering the effect of the supervisor's expressive suppression and time pressure as boundary conditions.

Multisource data were collected from 132 teams in northwestern China, including 132 supervisors and 648 subordinates. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test the effects.

The subordinate’s expressive suppression was positively related to their workplace creativity. Challenge time pressure was positively related to workplace creativity, and the subordinate’s expressive suppression was positively related to workplace creativity when challenge time pressure was lower and the supervisor's expressive suppression was higher. Hindrance time pressure was negatively related to workplace creativity, and a positive relationship between a subordinate's expressive suppression and workplace creativity was also found with less hindrance time pressure and greater expressive suppression by their supervisor.

By examining the role of the supervisor as a source of downward spillovers in various time pressure contexts, the study explains why a subordinate’s suppression facilitates workplace creativity from the conservation of resources perspective.

Using equity theory, this study aims to examine the role of customer incivility in effecting service sabotage among hotel employees by recognizing the mediating role of revenge motivation and the moderating effect of emotion regulation.

A multi-wave, multi-source questionnaire survey was conducted with 291 employee–supervisor dyads at chain hotels in Shenzhen, China. Previously developed and validated measures for customer incivility, revenge motivation, emotion regulation and service sabotage were adopted to test the hypotheses.

Customer incivility increased employees’ revenge motivation and service sabotage. Emotion regulation acted as a boundary condition for customer incivility’s direct effect on revenge motivation and its indirect effect on service sabotage through revenge motivation. Cognitive reappraisal mitigated the detrimental influence of customer incivility, whereas expressive suppression worsened its adverse effects.

Managers should monitor and deter the emergence of uncivil behaviors, provide psychological support for employees experiencing customer incivility and encourage these employees to use cognitive reappraisal rather than expressive suppression as an emotion regulation strategy.

To the authors’ knowledge, no prior research has investigated the customer incivility–service sabotage relationship in the hotel industry. This study sheds light on how customer incivility can motivate service sabotage among hotel employees. Furthermore, the authors used equity theory rather than the commonly adopted resources perspective to offer new insights into the customer incivility–service sabotage relationship.

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 (Côté, 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 disambiguating 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.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the associations between personal sense of power (PSP) and compliance as a function of the interaction between negative emotion intensity and emotion regulation tactics.

First, hypotheses linking PSP to different emotional reactions and to different levels of compliance with two types of conflict management styles were formulated. Subsequently, data were collected in three waves with a five-week interval between them to test the hypotheses.

Results based on principle component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis indicated that workers with high PSP reported lower internalized negative emotions (negative emotions directed to the self) in the workplace and were less inclined to comply with harsh tactics, in comparison to workers with low PSP. The importance of emotional components (suppression and negative emotions in the workplace) was underscored by the moderated mediation model: internalized negative emotions mediated the association between PSP and compliance with harsh tactics as a function of level of suppression such that the link between negative affect and compliance was negative only under high suppression, but not under low suppression.

The findings point to the deleterious influence of high emotional suppression of negative emotions on study behaviors, especially for employees with a low sense of power. Because the data were collected from a single source, which could raise concerns about common method variance and social desirability bias, future study should examine other-reports.

Recruitment and training of employees and managers should aim to create an open and safe organizational environment that encourages emotional expression and lessens emotional suppression.

The findings can help develop empowering interventional programs to coach employees to use suppression in an adaptive manner.

The current study sheds new light on the relationships between PSP and compliance from the emotion regulation perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that the emotional expressions (i.e. emotional masking and emotional sharing) of students play in fostering positive implicit abilities, as indicated by learning, interpersonal skills and the ability to acquire a supervisor’s support. By introducing a new theory of creative expressiveness, the authors have further examined whether college students’ creative thinking is significantly associated with their emotional expression.

This paper establishes a conceptual framework to map the relationships between students’ emotional expressions, their implicit abilities and their creative abilities. Scale measures of these constructs were built, and a total of 400 questionnaires were distributed at universities in Hefei and Nanjing. Finally, ordinary least squares estimations were conducted to provide quantitative estimations.

The empirical results show that emotional sharing is significantly positive for college students’ implicit and creative abilities, while emotional masking is negatively related to students’ implicit abilities and creativity. Moreover, the effects of emotional sharing by college students on their creative abilities are partially mediated by students’ implicit abilities.

It is necessary to emphasize emotional sharing in education and to create a friendly atmosphere for students, in which they can feel comfortable expressing themselves in class. Likewise, students should learn to improve their expressive abilities, particularly how to express and share their inner feelings and emotions, since this will contribute to their creative thinking.

It is increasingly being recognized in organizational science that emotions and the way they are experienced and expressed by employees in work environments have fundamental impacts on work-related outcomes. However, limited attention has been given to the impacts of emotional expression on students’ learning performances and creativity abilities, especially in the Chinese context where students are more reluctant to express their emotions and ideas. Thus, by introducing a new theory of creative expressiveness to examine the benefits of emotional expression for students’ implicit abilities and creative thinking, the authors have sought to extend prior research on the cultivation of college students’ creative abilities.

The aim of this paper was to investigate the role of emotion regulation and age in reactions to psychological contract breach towards positive and negative affect. The authors expected that in the context of contract breach, reappraisal emotion regulation mitigate the negative relation with affect. Moreover, based on lifespan theory, suppression emotion regulation was expected to be important for younger workers, because older workers have learned how to express themselves appropriately at the workplace. Consequently, suppression would mitigate the relations of contract breach with well‐being only among younger workers, while it strengthened the relation for older workers.

Data were collected among 163 employees working in various Dutch organizations. Moderated regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Reappraisal mitigated the relation of contract breach with positive affect, and suppression mitigated the relations of contract breach with positive affect only among younger workers, while for older workers with high suppression the relations were accentuated. It was also found that contract breach was more strongly related to negative affect for younger workers than for older workers.

Reactions towards psychological contract breaches are influenced by the emotion regulation strategies people employ. Especially reappraisal is important to maintain optimal levels of affect, while suppression is detrimental especially for older workers.

This paper is the first study in which emotion regulation strategies are investigated in the context of psychological contract breaches. The paper presents novel insights into how reactions to contract breaches are modified through emotion regulation strategies and age.

Scholars and practitioners in the OB literature nowadays appreciate that emotions and emotional regulation constitute an inseparable part of work life, but the HRM literature has lagged in addressing the emotional dimensions of life at work. In this chapter therefore, beginning with a multi-level perspective taken from the OB literature, we introduce the roles played by emotions and emotional regulation in the workplace and discuss their implications for HRM. We do so by considering five levels of analysis: (1) within-person temporal variations, (2) between persons (individual differences), (3) interpersonal processes; (4) groups and teams, and (5) the organization as a whole. We focus especially on processes of emotional regulation in both self and others, including discussion of emotional labor and emotional intelligence. In the opening sections of the chapter, we discuss the nature of emotions and emotional regulation from an OB perspective by introducing the five-level model, and explaining in particular how emotions and emotional regulation play a role at each of the levels. We then apply these ideas to four major domains of concern to HR managers: (1) recruitment, selection, and socialization; (2) performance management; (3) training and development; and (4) compensation and benefits. In concluding, we stress the interconnectedness of emotions and emotional regulation across the five levels of the model, arguing that emotions and emotional regulation at each level can influence effects at other levels, ultimately culminating in the organization’s affective climate.

Research has largely shown that supervisors' negative emotions lead to subordinates' negative emotions and detrimental work outcomes, but recent studies are showing that supervisor negative emotions may yield both negative and positive subordinate behaviours. Drawing on the work–home resources model, this research sought to unpack the interpersonal, cross-domain effects of supervisor negative emotions on subordinate cognitive work engagement and family undermining through subordinate perceived leader effectiveness and self-efficacy to manage work and life.

To test the relationships, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling were conducted on time-lagged dyadic data collected from 372 supervisor–subordinate pairs.

Results revealed that supervisor negative emotions led to higher levels of subordinate cognitive work engagement and family undermining.

Supervisor negative emotions had unintended consequences on subordinates' work and family outcomes – they enhanced subordinates' cognitive work engagement (positive work outcome) but also increased subordinates' family undermining (negative family outcome). Future studies could benefit from a diary study with a within-subject design since emotions are known to fluctuate in a day.

This research provides supervisors with insights about the consequences of their negative emotions on their subordinates, calls upon organisations to provide cognitive regulation training, and encourages subordinates to develop self-efficacy in managing their work and life.

This study is among the first to incorporate self-efficacy to manage work and life as a personal resource and subordinate family undermining as an outcome of supervisor negative emotions, which enhances understanding of the resource allocation and loss processes between supervisors and subordinates.

The purpose of this study is to explore an under‐researched, emotion‐focused influence tactic, strategic emotional display, and its interpersonal and career outcomes.

The authors collected data from 258 matched supervisor‐subordinate dyads in a Chinese sample.

The results indicate that individuals who use positive emotions in social influence tend to enhance their access to network resources and career growth potential, and those who use negative emotions in social influence tend to erode their network resources and hinder career growth potential.

A major limitation of the research is that the authors collected data on both strategic emotional display and network resources from the same source at the same time. Supporting prior research, the results indicate that individuals do use emotional expression as a social influence tactic at work, and that different emotion‐focused influence tactics are associated with different outcomes. The study makes evident the need to integrate the emotion and the social influence literature.

The results of the study indicate that employees may need to develop greater awareness of their own emotions, and cultivate the ability to convey emotional cues to others effectively. It also appears that individuals need to be selective in their use of emotion‐focused influence tactics.

The paper integrates social influence and emotion research, and focuses on a ubiquitous yet overlooked influence tactic, strategic emotional display, and shows evidence that it is associated with interpersonal and career outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relations between emotion regulation (reappraisal and suppression), discrete emotions and emotional exhaustion among nurses.

A cross-sectional design was used with 168 nurses in South Korea. Structural equation modeling and path analysis were conducted for analysis.

Reappraisal correlated positively with enjoyment and pride and negatively with anxiety, anger and frustration, whereas suppression correlated negatively with enjoyment and positively with anxiety and frustration. Moreover, reappraisal was negatively associated with emotional exhaustion, whereas suppression was positively associated with it. Enjoyment was negatively related to emotional exhaustion, and anger and frustration were positively related to it. Enjoyment and frustration mediated the relation between emotion regulation and emotional exhaustion. Findings demonstrate the potentially beneficial influences of reappraisal as well as harmful impacts of suppression in the nursing context.

This paper expands research on nurses’ emotion management by applying Gross’s emotion regulation framework rather than Hochschild’s emotional labor framework. The mediating result suggests that not only nurses but also hospital administrators and nurse managers should pay attention to nurses’ emotional experiences to improve nurses’ well-being and ultimately better nursing practice. This research can provide the basis for developing practical interventions to efficiently regulate nurses’ emotions.

This is the first study exploring the mediating role of emotions in the link between nurses’ emotion regulation and emotional exhaustion. It contributes to interdisciplinary research by integrating perspectives from psychological emotion and emotion regulation research into the nursing field.