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1. Introduction
Research on emotions in the workplace has become increasingly important as employers realise that emotions lie at the core of workplace interactions and a variety of outcomes (Hochschild, 1983). Emotion regulation, or “the process of regulating both feelings and expressions for organizational goals” or social norms is key to understanding how emotions are experienced and displayed at work, their impact on employee well-being, and evaluations of performance (Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002; Groth et al., 2009). Employees can use certain strategies such as surface or deep acting to regulate their emotions (Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002; Groth et al., 2009). Emotion regulation has been deemed critical to a broad category of service workers such as human service workers, customer service providers and sales personnel (Grandey, 2000, 2003; Hochschild, 1983), but little research to date has examined its impact on HR professionals.
HR professionals represent critical internal service providers who have a large degree of inter-personal contact with a variety of internal and external clients (Torrington et al., 2011), often playing dual roles within organisations which can be complex and emotionally laden (Kulik et al., 2009; Torrington et al., 2011; Ulrich et al., 2007). On the one hand, HR professionals are expected to act as “strategic partners” and play an active role in the organisation’s design, strategic change, and management development initiatives (Caldwell, 2001). On the other hand, HR professionals are also expected to play a “caring role” wherein they deal with specific employee issues which cause distress (Renwick, 2003), act as mediators in conflict resolution (Van Gramberg and Teicher, 2006) or as “toxin handlers” (Kulik et al., 2009; Metz et al., 2012). For human resource professionals, the freedom to reveal one’s authentic emotions might conflict with organisational structures and professional roles, thereby forcing employees to suppress negative emotions and display positive ones (Schaubroeck and Jones, 2000), which may, in turn, lead to experience significant role conflict and ambiguity (Brewer and Clippard, 2002), and even burnout (Kahnweiler and Kahnweiler, 2005; Maslach et al., 1996; Metz et al., 2012).
Although previous studies have explored the cumulative effects of emotion regulation on burnout (Judge et al., 2009), little is known about the role of individual differences in...