Regulating emotions in times of crisis - A qualitative study of healthcare managers' interpersonal emotion regulation in the Swedish intensive care during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract: Crises pose challenges for organisations, generating heavy emotional tolls on employees and other organisational stakeholders. Within these contexts, leaders shoulder a crucial responsibility in regulating negative emotions to ensure organisational survival and success. However, scholars have devoted limited attention to this area of research. This paper examines a contemporary crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and how healthcare managers in Swedish intensive care regulated the emotions of their employees during this time. The study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with 13 healthcare managers that had worked in Swedish intensive care during the COVID-19 pandemic and adopted a theoretical framework integrating models from the field of emotion regulation and job demand-resources theory. According to the research, managers used four main strategies to regulate employee emotions: cognitive change, attentional deployment, situation modification, and response modulation. Additionally, it was found that an imbalance between job demands and job resources negatively impacts the interpersonal emotion regulation process through exhaustion and reflective processes through time constraints. The paper reduces existing gaps in the emotion regulation literature and has implications relevant to healthcare managers and organisational decision-makers seeking to address the regulation of emotions during crises.