Prévue : Sabrina VON NESSEN

Jury

Abstract

Virtual and hybrid work change the conditions under which managers interpret situations, perceive emotional cues, and act. This paper-based dissertation examines how emotion regulation is reconstructed as a management-relevant concept, integrated into virtual-leadership research, organizationally enabled, and individually enacted in situations characterized by emotional ambiguity. The research program comprises five complementary contributions. Two literature review papers combine bibliometric analyses with interpretive reading to reconstruct, first, the development of emotion regulation in management research and, second, the position of emotional constructs in virtual-leadership research. The qualitative strand draws on 54 semi-structured interviews conducted in Germany in 2022 with managers experienced in virtual or hybrid leadership. The study of organizational conditions analyzes 45 interviews; the studies of individual enactment and its practice translation use an analytical sample of 51 interviews. The qualitative analyses are abductive and interpretive. The findings show, first, that emotion regulation was imported from psychology, translated into organizational contexts, hybridized with other theories, and reconstructed to explain managerial phenomena. In virtual-leadership research, emotional phenomena are common, but the intrapersonal process through which managers regulate their own responses remains insufficiently specified. Digital mediation does not remove emotion; it can reduce emotional observability and create ambiguity when several interpretations of the same cue remain plausible. At the organizational level, the dissertation develops the concept of emotional development infrastructure: a configuration of organizational resources, Human Resource Development practices, reflective and social learning spaces, and work-design conditions that can support managers’ emotion-regulation capacity. At the individual level, it develops a qualitative process model of emotion-regulation flexibility involving emotional ambiguity, situational awareness, regulatory repertoire, context-sensitive selection and adaptation, and monitoring, learning, and adjustment. Flexibility therefore does not reside in the use of one preferred strategy, but in fitting a response to the medium, timing, relationship, task, and leadership purpose and revising it in light of feedback. The dissertation thus offers a bounded, multi-level explanation of emotion regulation in virtual leadership. It distinguishes conceptual development, organizational conditions of capacity, and individual enactment without presenting them as a tested causal chain. It also shows that managerial development should not substitute for examining organizational sources of overload, intrusive control, or avoidable emotional demands.