Negativity decontaminating: Communication media affordances for emotion regulation strategies

Highlights

• Communication media facilitate emotion regulation via affording negativity decontaminating.

• Negativity decontaminating affordances exist at the individual and group levels.

• Negativity decontaminating affordances include filtering, isolating, barriering and containing.

• Tech-organizational context affects the exercising and actualization of negativity decontaminating.

• Tech-organizational context may be stimulating and inhibiting, releasing and suppressing.

Abstract

A challenging part of many occupations is dealing with negative emotions from customers, coworkers and other communication partners on a daily basis. This paper describes a case-based, inductive study of information technology (IT) help-desk workers within a Fortune 500 energy company and the communication media and emotion regulation strategies (ERSs) they employ for dealing with negative emotions from communication partners. Using the technology affordance perspective as the theoretical lens to understand the role of communication media, the present study is the first of its kind to document empirically how employees and management can leverage communication media to ease the strain of emotion regulation upon members and the IT help-desk group—an original concept we label negativity decontaminating. Here, individuals' technologically enabled ERSs are metaphorically likened to the techniques used by medical workers to avoid contamination from viruses. This negativity decontaminating potential includes several media affordances existing at two levels: a group level affordance (negativity filtering) and individual level affordances (negativity isolating, negativity barriering, and negativity containing). Moreover, the tech-organizational contexts at the case organization gave rise to a set of conditions that affected the exercising and actualization of media's negativity decontaminating potential.

Introduction

Help-desk work would be fantastic, if it weren't for the help-desk part. We've all been there: dealing with users who are impatient, unreasonable, and often downright abusive.

– IT Veteran Comment on Help-desk Abuse

The business itself and the people who ran it were cause for far more stress than the customers ever provided. And the customers provided plenty.

– Ubuntu Forum Post for the Thread “Ever had a help-desk job?”

Communicating with angry customers, coworkers, and bosses can take a heavy emotional toll on working adults (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995; Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002; Grandey, 2000; Morris & Feldman, 1996), who must manage their emotional experiences and/or expressions during such encounters. Managing emotional experiences and expressions is referred to as emotion regulation, defined here as the attempt to influence which emotions we have, when we have them, and how these emotions are experienced or expressed (Gross, 1998). Without question, many industries and tasks (explicitly or implicitly) require emotion regulation from employees (Grandey, 2000; Hochschild, 1983). Those working in service industries (including technology support such as IT help-desk) engage in emotion regulation as they attempt to coordinate with colleagues and serve customers who may be experiencing frustration and anger (Rutner, Hardgrave, & McKnight, 2008; Rutner, Riemenschneider, O'Leary-Kelly, & Hardgrave, 2011). Stress, burnout, absenteeism and turnover are just some of the individual and organizational outcomes known to result from frequent and challenging emotion regulation at work (see Gross, 1998, Gross, 2002 for reviews).

Emotion regulation, apart from being a frequent requirement at work, also helps with managing emotional contagion defined as the tendency for individuals to converge emotionally (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994). Emotional contagion has been observed at different levels and in both face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (CMC) environments (Barsade & Gibson, 2007; Cheshin, Rafaeli, & Bos, 2011). Emotional contagion may occur directly on individuals who are targets of the emotion or who are communication partners of the emotion source, or indirectly on individuals who are bystanders or third-party observers (Hareli & Rafaeli, 2008; Rupp & Spencer, 2006)—these bystanders are also referred to as “outsiders” (Goffman, 1959). Failure to manage emotional contagion may lead to various negative consequences for the employee and the organization (Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004).

Considering the prevalence of emotion regulation requirements at work and the potential impacts on employees and organizations, it is not surprising that significant scholarly effort has been spent on understanding how to facilitate emotion regulation. Extensive attention has been given to understanding the different emotion regulation strategies (ERSs) that individuals may use (Elfenbein, 2007; Gross, 1998). Researchers have also examined individuals' capabilities related to emotion regulation such as self-efficacy (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002) and efforts designed to improve individuals' capabilities such as training (Grant, 2013).

Existing research examining how to facilitate emotion regulation largely focused on the traditional face-to-face environment (Elfenbein, 2007; Grandey, 2000; Gross, 1998). The small number of research studies on emotion regulation using CMC often treat CMC simply as the study context and pay inadequate attention to the potential influence of communication media, for example a study about 911 call-takers and their emotion regulation (Tracy & Tracy, 1998). Notably absent from the existing emotion regulation research is an understanding of how external tools like communication media may affect (facilitate or inhibit) emotion regulation. In other words, do communication media make emotion regulation more or less challenging?

Some of the existing research may pessimistically suggest that emotion regulation in CMC is likely to be more challenging. For example, CMC research on flaming suggests that features of the CMC environment such as anonymity may reduce individuals' awareness and motivation to regulate their emotional expressions, consequently encouraging more negative emotional communication (Kiesler, Siegel, & McGuire, 1984; Spears & Lea, 1994). On the other hand, the CMC literature (Te'eni, 2001; Walther, 1996) also indicates strongly that communication media may be exploited to facilitate intra- and inter-personal processes, such as emotion regulation. For example, communication media's facilitating role for selective self-presentation (Walther, 1996) could apply to selective expression of emotions.

The contrasting views regarding communication media's influence on emotion regulation might be reconciled by examining their different assumptions and foci. The pessimistic view directs attention to message senders and how CMC affects senders' awareness and motivation related to emotion regulation. The optimistic view directs attention to message receivers and how CMC affects their capabilities related to emotion regulation (when they already have the awareness and motivation to do so). In this paper, we are interested in understanding what individuals might do to leverage communication media to mitigate the effects of being the receivers of negative emotional communication—we recognize that receivers of negative emotional communication may need to respond to communication partners (and hence be senders in the response communication back to partners); yet in the initial negative emotional communication that individuals seek to regulate, they are receivers (of negative emotional communication from partners). Thus, we ask,

RQ: How do communication media support the use of emotion regulation strategies (ERSs) for individuals working in a negative emotion-laden environment?

To answer the above research question, we conducted semi-structured interviews with IT help-desk employees at a Fortune 500 energy company. Analysis revealed that IT help-desk employees' emotion regulation when interacting with communication partners expressing negative emotions is akin to resisting contamination from viruses and, more importantly, that communication media may facilitate emotion regulation via its potential for negativity decontaminating: Negative emotion starts with negative communication partners, akin to patient zero, and spreads to IT help-desk employees via emotional contagion. Our data demonstrate that IT help-desk employees utilized the negativity decontaminating potential of communication media to avoid or treat negativity contamination and their efforts operated at two levels (group and individual). At the group level, IT help-desk leaders used media to filter negativity out of the IT help desk, avoiding or reducing negativity exposure for the whole group. We labeled this negativity filtering. At the individual level, IT help-desk employees used media to avoid negativity exposure (negativity isolating), to reduce or delay negativity exposure (negativity barriering), or to control the scope of negativity exposure and prevent crossover onto others (negativity containing). Moreover, the exercising and actualization of communication media's negativity decontaminating potential were affected by the tech-organizational contexts at the participating organization. By documenting the negativity decontaminating potential, this research provides insight into the protective socio-emotional qualities of communication media.

The present study directs scholarly attention to the ways individual employees and the whole group work within communication media to regulate emotions in a negative emotion-laden working environment. Below, a review of the literature on emotion regulation and ERSs is offered, followed by an explanation of a new theoretical lens for understanding the facilitating role of communication media, the technology affordance and constraint theory (Markus & Silver, 2008). Next, we discuss the research setting, data collection, and analysis. We then present our findings and a set of figures that situate our findings within the technology affordance literature. In the end, we discuss limitations, theoretical contributions, practical implications, and transferability of our findings to other like contexts.