Karen Niven

The University of Sheffield | Sheffield · Management School

This book summarises 28 quirky and innovative research projects, each of which illustrates how psychology can make a positive difference to communities, healthcare, or workplaces. It highlights the work of the Richard Benjamin Trust, a charitable trust set up to support cutting-edge psychological research designed to make a difference to society. T...

Emotion researchers are increasingly interested in processes by which people influence others’ feelings. Although one such process, interpersonal emotion regulation, has received particular attention in recent years, there remains confusion about exactly how to define this process. The present article aims to distinguish interpersonal emotion regul...

Controlled interpersonal affect regulation refers to the deliberate regulation of someone else’s affect. Building on existing research concerning this everyday process, the authors describe the development of a theoretical classification scheme that distinguishes between the types of strategy used to achieve interpersonal affect regulation. To test...

Research on affect regulation has blossomed in recent years. However, the lack of validated scales assessing individual differences in the use of strategies to achieve alternative types of affect regulation, e.g., the regulation of others’ affect and the worsening of affect, has hampered research on these important processes. This paper presents th...

Segmentation of work from nonwork life is widely presented as desirable to maximize recovery from work. Yet it involves effort which may reduce its positive effects. We present a dual-process model of segmentation based on integrating boundary theory and self-regulation theory that shows how creating and maintaining boundaries can have both positiv...

People vary in the effectiveness with which they can change the way that others feel, yet we know surprisingly little about what drives these individual differences in interpersonal emotion regulation success. This paper provides a framework for describing ‘success’ in interpersonal emotion regulation and synthesizes extant theory and research rega...

Theoretical models of interpersonal extrinsic emotion regulation (the regulation of others’ emotions) recognize many different regulation strategies, yet existing assessments do not assess a wide number of strategies at a granular level. In the present research, we develop the Regulation of Others’ Emotions Scale (ROES) to capture eight extrinsic e...

Interpersonal emotion regulation is common in everyday life and important to various outcomes. However, there is a lack of understanding about the personality profiles of people who are good at regulating others’ emotions. We conducted a dyadic study, pairing 89 ‘regulators’ and ‘targets’, with the targets subjected to a psychosocial stressor in th...

Researchers have consistently shown the detrimental effects that workplace bullying has on employee well-being. While there have been many studies examining moderating factors that worsen or mitigate bullying’s effects, the field lacks a common theoretical framework to integrate and explain these diverse moderators. The aim of this systematic revie...

As greater numbers of people have worked at home during the COVID‐19 pandemic, workers, organizations and policy makers have begun considering the benefits of a sustained move towards homeworking, with workers’ satisfaction with homeworking often cited as a key driver. But is satisfaction with homeworking that relevant to workers’ overall job satis...

The COVID-19 pandemic heightened uncertainties in people’s lives—and was itself a source of fresh uncertainty. We report a study of homeworkers on whether such uncertainties, and particularly those related to their work environment, are associated with lower levels of well-being and whether this association is exacerbated by prior poor well-being....

Many workers are subjected to incidents of rudeness and ignorance at work. Emerging evidence suggests that exposure to such incivility has an immediate impact on people’s daily well-being and commitment. In this article we contribute to this nascent area of enquiry by investigating the role of discrete emotions in explaining how exposure to incivil...

Workplace bullying has negative effects on targets' well-being. Researchers are increasingly aware that bullying occurs within social contexts and is often witnessed by others in the organization, such as bystanders. However, we know little about how bystanders' responses influence outcomes for those exposed to bullying. In this multilevel study, i...

Recent research has shown that leader interpersonal emotion regulation is a relevant process for fostering desirable work outcomes. Expanding knowledge on this stream of research, here we argue that to have a complete view of the influence of leader interpersonal emotion regulation, the motives underlying the regulation behavior, namely, egocentric...

Workplace mistreatment regularly occurs in the presence of others (i.e., observers). The reactions of observers toward those involved in the mistreatment episode have wide-reaching implications. In the current set of studies, we draw on theories of perspective-taking to consider how this form of interpersonal sensemaking influences observer reactio...

As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments encouraged or mandated homeworking wherever possible. This study examines the impact of this public health initiative on homeworkers’ well-being. It explores if the general factors such as job autonomy, demands, social support and work–nonwork conflict, which under normal circumstances are cr...

Societal and political changes mean that individuals are working until later in life, leading to interest in whether older workers' effectiveness differs from that of younger workers. An important predictor of work effectiveness is ‘interpersonal emotion regulation’, that is, the management of others' feelings. However, little is known so far about...

Where do individual differences in emotion regulation come from? This review examines theoretical and empirical evidence describing the role that personality traits play in shaping individuals' intrapersonal and interpersonal regulation styles. We define and delineate personality traits and emotion regulation and summarize empirical relations betwe...

Interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) refers to the actions of influencing other people’s feelings. We apply this construct to the context of leadership to determine whether leader IER may explain followers’ performance. Drawing on emotions-as-social-information theory, we argue that leader strategies to improve or worsen followers’ feelings would...

How do we explain the behaviour of employees who encounter workplace bullying but fail to intervene, or sometimes even join the perpetrator? We often assume that bystanders witnessing bullying will restore justice, but empirical research suggests that they may also behave in ways that continue, or worsen, its progression. Recent theories have attem...

An important part of many job roles-such as coaches, instructors, and leaders-is trying to improve the performance of others. In this paper we examine whether affect-improving interpersonal affect regulation (i.e., deliberate attempts to improve the emotion and mood of another person) plays a positive role in this process. We develop a model which...

Interpersonal emotion regulation is an important psychological function in social behaviour. However, this construct has still been scantly explored in work psychology and organizational settings, meaning that the effects of interpersonal emotion regulation on core aspects of work performance are as yet unknown. Thus, our article seeks to provide i...

Attempts to improve others' feelings have positive consequences, while attempts to worsen others' feelings have negative consequences. But do such effects depend on the motives underlying these attempts? In an experimental study, we tested whether leaders' apparent motives influence the effects of their interpersonal emotion regulation on followers...

This paper aims to: (a) explore the impact of witnessing workplace bullying on emotional exhaustion, work-related anxiety and work-related depression; and (b) determine whether the resources of trait optimism, co-worker support, and supportive supervisory style buffer the effects of witnessed bullying. In a two-wave study involving 194 employees, w...

A considerable amount of research has been published on career plateau since its first appearance in the careers literature in the 1970s. There is therefore a need to summarise what is known about the field in its entirety and what remains unanswered. This paper presents a review of career plateau research published between 1977 and 2017 and includ...

Why do people try to influence the way others feel? Previous research offers two competing accounts of people’s motives for attempting to regulate others’ emotions. The instrumental account holds that people use interpersonal emotion regulation to benefit their own goal pursuit. Conversely, the prosocial account holds that people use interpersonal...

Leader affective presence is the tendency of leaders to elicit feelings that are consistent among other individuals, and has been supported as a relevant personality trait for understanding teamwork. Drawing on a model that integrates personality and emotion regulation, this study aimed to expand research on affective presence by proposing team mem...

Integrating insights from the organizational social networks and workplace affect literatures, the authors propose a dynamic model of relationships, focusing on the affect experienced within dyadic work relationships to predict their trajectory over time: either improving, declining, or static. The feelings each partner typically experiences within...

This symposium focuses on the intersection of relational and social network research with a socio-functional view of emotions, which argues that affective exchanges actively shape relational dynamics. The aim of the present symposium is to provide further insight into the dynamic interplay between emotions, relationships and social networks, taking...

Career plateau is often associated with undesirable outcomes, but the reasons for this association remain unclear and the evidence for the effects of plateau has mainly been cross-sectional. The current study adopts a three-wave longitudinal design to explore a potential mechanism of the negative effects of career plateau on job attitudes. Drawing...

Reports from projects invrestigating innovative social and organisational psychology - that make a difference to society. Written in accessible ways. Free to download or view online at http://www.richardbenjamintrust.co.uk/

Affective presence is a novel, emotion-related personality trait, supported in experimental studies, concerning the extent to which a person makes his or her interaction partners feel the same way (Eisenkraft & Elfenbein, 2010). Applying this concept to an applied teamwork context, we proposed that team-leader-affective presence would influence tea...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is likely to become the major tool for studying the neural underpinnings of organizational behavior. It is a technique for brain imaging that, according to advocates, provides information about which areas of the brain are activated during organizational processes (e.g., leadership and decision-making)....

Two dyadic studies investigated interpersonal worry regulation in heterosexual relationships. In Study 1, we video-recorded 40 romantic couples discussing shared concerns. Male partners' worry positively predicted female partners' interpersonal calming attempts, and negatively predicted female partners' interpersonal alerting attempts (i.e., attemp...

Affective presence is a novel personality construct that describes the tendency of individuals to make their interaction partners feel similarly positive or negative. We adopt this construct, together with the Input-Process-Output model of teamwork, to understand how team leaders influence team interaction and innovation performance. In two multiso...

Managers’ abuse of subordinates is a common form of unethical behaviour in workplaces. When exposed to such abuse, employees may go absent from work. We propose two possible explanations for employee absence in response to managerial abuse: a sociological explanation based on perceptions of organizational justice and a psychological explanation bas...

People in organizations often try to change the feelings of those they interact with. Research in this area has to date focused on how people try to regulate others’ emotions, with less attention paid to understanding the reasons why. This paper presents a theoretical framework that proposes three overarching dimensions of motivations for interpers...

We examine how the use of mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs) among self-employed homeworkers affects their experience of work, focusing particularly on where work is carried out, how the work/non-work boundary is managed, and people's experiences of social and professional isolation. Positively, their use enhanced people's sen...

Building relationships is crucial for satisfaction and success, especially when entering new social contexts. In the present paper, we investigate whether attempting to improve others’ feelings helps people to make connections in new networks. In Study 1, a social network study following new networks of people for a 12-week period indicated that us...

Presenteeism refers to the phenomenon whereby employees continue to attend work while unwell. Existing research suggests that presentee workers may suffer consequences to their health and mental strain. In this paper, we investigate whether such consequences also have downstream effects in terms of the errors people make at work. We studied the eff...

Recent research indicates that people consistently make others feel a certain way (e.g. happy or stressed). This individual difference has been termed affective presence, but little is known about its correlates or consequences. The present study investigated the following: (i) whether affective presence influences others' romantic interest in a pe...

Setting goals in the workplace can motivate improved performance but it might also compromise ethical behavior. In this paper, we propose that individual differences in dispositional tendency to morally justify behavior moderate the effects of specific performance goals on unethical behavior. We conducted an experimental study in which working part...

Purpose – This research explored the role of hope and optimism in facilitating task adaptivity, individuals’ positive behavior response to change affecting their core task. Design/methodology/approach – Study 1 explored the relationship of hope and optimism with task adaptivity in a short longitudinal study of insurance company employees in the UK...

We propose an affective relational theory (ART) in order to explain the trajectories that dyadic work relationships take over time and across the relational dynamic spectrum: from strengthening, to becoming dormant (neither engaged nor avoided), to decaying or even dying. We use the circumplex model to distinguish affective states according to thei...

Emotions are central to the leadership process. According to Humphrey (2002), emotions are pertinent to leadership in four main ways: (i) there are certain emotion-related traits necessary for effective leadership; (ii) managing emotions is an important behavior in the leadership process; (iii) leaders’ emotional displays influence followers’ perce...

Workplace bullying is detrimental to employees and organizations, yet in a meta-analytic review of studies representing a range of countries (North America, Scandinavian, and other European), approximately 15% of employees report being victimized at work (Nielsen, Matthiesen, & Einarsen, 2010). Workplace bullying is defined as repeated exposure, ov...

Purpose This research explored the role of hope and optimism in facilitating task adaptivity, individuals’ positive behavior response to change affecting their core task. Design/methodology/approach Study 1 explored the relationship of hope and optimism with task adaptivity in a short longitudinal study of insurance company employees in the UK (N =...

Music with lyrics about helping is shown to reduce aggression in the laboratory. This paper tests whether the prosocial lyric effect generalizes to reducing customer aggression in the workplace. A field experiment involved changing the hold music played to customers of a call center. The results of a 3 week study suggested that music significantly...

Studies investigating the neurophysiological basis of intrapersonal emotion regulation (control of one's own emotional experience) report that the frontal cortex exerts a modulatory effect on limbic structures such as the amygdala and insula. However, no imaging study to date has examined the neurophysiological processes involved in interpersonal e...

We examined the performance in a constant foreperiod task in two samples screened for either high or low scores on the core burnout dimension emotional exhaustion. In line with our expectations, participants scoring high on emotional exhaustion exhibited a specific deficit with respect to maintaining a high level of response readiness at longer for...

This review examines the nature, causes and consequences of momentary affect at work. It focuses on two major categories of affect: moods and discrete emotions. The review begins by explaining the nature of momentary affect and why it is important to study within-person fluctuations in affect. Following that it describes major theories and methods...

Recent research indicates that people consistently make others feel a certain way (e.g. happy or stressed). This individual difference has been termed affective presence, but little is known about its correlates or consequences. The present study investigated the following: (i) whether affective presence influences others' romantic interest in a pe...

In this article, we investigate the impact of engaging in ruminative‐style thoughts after exposure to workplace violence. Rumination is a form of self‐focused thinking characterized by abstract and passive negative thoughts. In an experimental study in which student volunteers were exposed to simulated violence using a video manipulation, the unple...

Individuals use a range of interpersonal emotion regulation strategies to influence the feelings of others, e.g., friends, family members, romantic partners, work colleagues. But little is known about whether people vary their strategy use across these different relational contexts. We characterize and measure this variability as “spin,” i.e., the...

People may be subjected to discrimination from a variety of sources in the workplace. In this study of mental health workers, we contrast four potential perpetrators of discrimination (managers, co-workers, patients, and visitors) to investigate whether the negative impact of discrimination on victims’ well-being will vary in strength depending on...

Previous studies have found that acts of self-control like emotion regulation deplete blood glucose levels. The present experiment investigated the hypothesis that the extent to which people's blood glucose levels decline during emotion regulation attempts is influenced by whether they believe themselves to be good or poor at emotion control. We fo...

Research suggests that people deliberately try to improve others’ feelings in a variety of social contexts. However, little is known about whether and how interpersonal affect regulation influences the quality of people’s relationships. Two applied social network studies investigated the relational effects of interpersonal affect regulation. In Stu...

The aim of this study was to investigate whether employees experience emotional drain when they witness unpleasant interactions between coworkers. This was tested in a sample of staff in a UK hospital department, which included nurses, doctors, specialists and administrative staff. The study used a diary method in which participants recorded their...

The aim of this study was to investigate whether employees experience emotional drain when they witness unpleasant interactions between coworkers. This was tested in a sample of staff in a UK hospital department, which included nurses, doctors, specialists and administrative staff. The study used a diary method in which participants recorded their...

Workplace aggression poses a significant challenge to organizations due to its potential impact on employees' mental and physical well-being. Using two studies, this article investigates whether emotion regulation could alleviate the negative effects of exposure to workplace aggression on employees' experience of strain, among social workers (N = 7...

Individuals in a variety of social contexts try to regulate other people's feelings, but how does this process affect the regulators themselves? This research aimed to establish a relationship between people's use of interpersonal affect regulation and their own affective well-being. In a field study, self- and other-reported data were collected fr...

Does how we feel depend on what other people in our social network are feeling? Recent research suggests that it might; this article examines the evidence and describes some of the mechanisms that may enable this to occur. Also what cognitive or social functions could be served by the transfer of feelings between people, and is there an equivalent...

In therapeutic communities (TCs), it is typical for individuals to spend a great deal of time in the company of fellow TC members. This is particularly true of prison-based TCs, where staff members and inmates work and live in close quarters. The amount of time spent with fellow TC members produces a large amount of interactions, which are often em...

Summary document of 'Unacceptable behaviour, heath and well-being at work - a cross-lagged longitudinal study'

During and outside of work, the ways in which people manage their own and others’ emotions and moods can impact on their own and others’ well-being. For example, in relation to managing one’s own affect, constantly having to present a happy face towards customers can result in emotional exhaustion, particularly if this expression of emotion is not...

This paper concerns a research study conducted at HMP Grendon examining the behaviours used by staff members and prisoners to influence each others’ moods, referred to as emotional influence strategies. The use of emotional influence has been reported in other contexts (e.g., hospitals, support groups), and may have important outcomes including wel...