Suppress to get along: a lifespan account of social motives for suppression at work

Expressive suppression, an emotion regulation strategy that entails hiding one’s feelings, is commonly used to deal with interpersonal stressors at work, despite its negative relationship with affective well-being. To understand the context around suppression at work, we adopted a motivated, situational emotion regulation perspective to investigate the motives and context of suppression use at work. In a daily diary study, we investigated the effects of experienced incivility, in concert with daily communion and status motives, in predicting suppression at work. Drawing on lifespan theories, we also addressed between-person differences in communion and status motives by investigating how age relates to these motives via two theoretically established developmental goal orientations - growth and maintenance. Data were analyzed from 291 participants who participated in a daily diary study with three daily measurements for 15 working days (3,159 daily records). At the within-person level, incivility and communion motives both predicted use of suppression. Status motives did not relate to suppression, nor did either motive interact with experienced incivility to predict suppression. At the between-person level, age was indirectly negatively related to status and communion motives via lower growth orientation. Our findings offer insights into how daily motives influence emotion regulation strategy use, as well as how age and developmental goal orientations relate to these motives at the inter-person level.