Emotion strategies at work

A good part of people's life is spent working. A person's job is the source of a variety of emotion-related processes and outcomes, including the intensity and frequency with which pleasant emotions (e.g., pride, joy, and calm) or negatives ones (e.g., anger, shame, sadness) are experienced, emotional exhaustion, or a sense of working realization or job involvement the person experiences. Such emotion-related processes might be hypothesized to constitute important parameters in defining life quality, at both the individual and the social level. In particular, emotion regulation processes are a crucial aspect of the working role in many so-called service jobs that imply employee-customer interactions: what kind of regulation processes are (and need to be) activated, with what frequency, and what are their antecedents and their consequences are very important aspects to be considered, because of their potential implications for the well-being of individuals, in addressing questions related to emotion politics. To address these issues (e.g., to explain the likelyhood that a worker will (need to) engage in emotional regulation, and with what consequences) a set of 5 studies was carried out with Italian workers performing service jobs in different sectors (e.g., schools, banks, hospitals, public offices). Both job-related variables (such as frequency and duration of the interactions an employee typically engages in with clients/customers, job position, and working experience), and individual variables (both psychological ones, such as level of job involvement and felt burnout, and sociodemographic ones, such as gender, marital status, and age), were taken into account. The results - obtained from a "macro" level analysis of the data collected in the 5 studies - confirmed the hypotheses that: * emotion regulation processes do occur in service jobs, * embedded in a net of relationships with several job and individual variables, emotion regulation can imply high psychological costs for service workers e.g., 'shallow' regulation processes (e.g., the regulation of facial expression of emotion, as opposed to a 'deeper' but more difficult-to-activate, more energy-taxing regulation process) have a personal cost indexed by working dissatisfaction, demotivation, and emotional exhaustion; burned out workers, in turn, entertain interactions with clients that are frustrating, ineffective, or even harmful. The obtained results lend themselves to more precise theoretical hypotheses, and operational definitions, of emotion-regulation processes in work settings, to be tested in future studies - e.g., when developing and testing measures of emotion regulation, we need to consider the degree to which culture is an important variable; the adequacy of the 'deep' regulation construct, and of its operationalization, needs to be further tested