Negativity decontaminating: Communication media affordances for emotion regulation strategies

A challenging part of many occupations is dealing with negative emotions from customers, coworkers and other communication partners on a daily basis. This paper describes a case-based, inductive study of information technology (IT) help-desk workers within a Fortune 500 energy company and the communication media and emotion regulation strategies (ERSs) they employ for dealing with negative emotions from communication partners. Using the technology affordance perspective as the theoretical lens to understand the role of communication media, the present study is the first of its kind to document empirically how employees and management can leverage communication media to ease the strain of emotion regulation upon members and the IT help-desk group—an original concept we label negativity decontaminating. Here, individuals' technologically enabled ERSs are metaphorically likened to the techniques used by medical workers to avoid contamination from viruses. This negativity decontaminating potential includes several media affordances existing at two levels: a group level affordance (negativity filtering) and individual level affordances (negativity isolating, negativity barriering, and negativity containing). Moreover, the tech-organizational contexts at the case organization gave rise to a set of conditions that affected the exercising and actualization of media's negativity decontaminating potential.