Managing emotions in ongoing service relationships: new intrinsic and extrinsic emotion regulation strategies from aged care

Managing emotions at work can be challenging for employees in service roles. Most emotional labor research has been conducted in settings of brief service interactions with strangers. Yet, many traditional family roles, such as aged and child care are now outsourced to personal service roles that have ongoing relationships with clients. The continuing nature of those relationships may result in employees using previously unknown strategies to regulate emotions. To develop an understanding of intrinsic and extrinsic emotion regulation (ER) strategies in service relationships, we interviewed 42 aged care employees in China. Using template analysis we found three new employee-client relationship-based intrinsic ER strategies (i.e. family appreciation, filial reappraisal and deliberate distancing), a self-based strategy (i.e. self-deterioration anticipation) and three client-based strategies (i.e. client deterioration anticipation, vulnerability justification and meaning identification) in managing one’s own emotions in service relationships. When managing others’ emotions in ongoing service settings, a new relationship-based extrinsic ER strategy (i.e. communal bonding) along with situation-based and client-based extrinsic ER strategies were identified. Employees can regulate their own and others’ emotions by crafting their relationships with clients. This study suggests that service relationship is a critical dimension of client interactions and should be considered in workplace ER research.