Media Affordance and Emotion Regulation in Organizational Communication

Emotion regulation and the use of emotion regulation strategies to manage one’s emotional experiences or expressions have received extensive attention in the management, communication and psychology literatures. Despite the extensive attention being paid to emotion regulation in organizational communication research, the role of media in facilitating successful utilizations of emotion regulation strategies is under-investigated. Utilizing the emerging technology affordance perspective as a lens to understand the role of communication media, this dissertation is devoted to understanding the role of communication media in facilitating emotion regulation in organizational communication. The dissertation is divided into three essays. The first essay utilizes a deductive approach and develops a set of propositions regarding media affordances that exist at the intersection of media features (as discussed in media synchronicity theory) and emotion regulation strategies in organizational dyadic communication. The second essay utilizes a qualitative and inductive approach. An original concept, hostility decontaminating, is proposed. Moreover, the original concept of hostility decontaminating includes several aspects (i.e., hostility filtering, hostility isolating, hostility barriering and hostility containing) that can be used individually or jointly to counteract the contagion of negative emotions at the workplace. The third essay seeks to examine the construct measurement issue for the relational concept of technology affordance. Specifically, the third essay compares the predictive capability of two measurement approaches in the context of media asynchronicity (i.e., a technology characteristic) affordance for display regulation (i.e., the most frequently used and studied emotion regulation strategy in organizational communication)