Emotion Regulation and Job Burnout: Investigating the relationship between emotion regulation knowledge, abilities and dispositions and their role in the prediction of Job Burnout

The present thesis has two goals: 1) to understand the relationship between three levels of emotion regulation - knowledge, abilities and dispositions - as proposed by the Three-level model of emotional competences (Mikolajczak, 2009) and 2) to investigate the role of these three levels in the prediction of job burnout – while accounting for the moderator role of the emotional labor of the job, and by distinguishing these effects in two professional sectors (finance and health-care sector). Methodologically, besides emotion regulation knowledge, specific emotion regulation strategies - reappraisal, suppression, enhancement and expressive flexibility – are considered and assessed both as abilities and as dispositions.
Results from goal 1 indicate that: a) knowledge, abilities and dispositions are not hierarchically structured; b) different strategies are independent from each other (both in terms of ability and in terms of disposition); c) the disposition to reappraise and to enhance do not depend on a priori knowledge or ability, while the disposition to suppress decreases as the emotion regulation knowledge and the ability to enhance increase.
Results from goal 2 indicate that emotion regulation knowledge, abilities and dispositions are incremental predictors of job burnout. Specifically: a) emotion regulation knowledge decreases emotional exhaustion, and reappraisal ability increases the sense of professional efficacy; b) expressive flexibility increases professional efficacy for workers in high emotional labor jobs, while its effect is detrimental for workers in low emotional labor jobs; c) suppression disposition protects individuals from professional inefficacy while suppression ability is detrimental in this regard. Finally, the results point out that different strategies have different impacts in different professional sectors, notably suppression which appears as a detrimental strategy for finance workers and as a protective strategy for health-care workers.
Overall, these results point out that several dimensions of emotion regulation are relevant in the prediction of job burnout. Specifically, knowledge, as well as abilities and dispositions seem to play an incremental role in explaining variability in job burnout symptoms. The effects of the specific strategies should not be analyzed in a simplistic way but instead, are better understood when taking into account the specificities of the job and the professional context.