At work and in everyday life, people regulate each other's emotions (i.e., extrinsic emotion regulation: EER). To date, research in this area has focused on how people try to regulate others’ emotions, but less is known about the choice of regulation strategies, and the goals they are trying to achieve. In this paper, we investigate the influence EER goals have on EER strategies that co-workers use to regulate each other’s emotions, and how this influences coworker relationship quality (conflict and team member exchange/TMX). Using a co-worker dyadic design (N = 553) we find that employees with pro-hedonic goals are more likely to use the EER strategy of allowing co-workers to talk about their problems (i.e. receptive listening) and this reduces relationship conflict. Employees with the instrumental goal to keep up appearances at work are more likely to ask their co-worker to suppress their emotions which reduces TMX and increases relationship conflict. These results extend theoretical insights into EER and have important practical implications for promoting high quality interactions between colleagues as well as interventions for building positive workplace cultures and emotion regulation norms within organizations.
