Emotion Regulation in the Workplace: How Insecure Attachment at Work Leads to Difficulties

Our Attachment at Work series investigates the relationships between workplace attachment patterns and personal and professional dynamics. In this article, we’re exploring the link between Attachment at Work and emotion regulation.

Emotion regulation, or emotional regulation, refers to your ability to handle changes in your emotions and control your behavioral response. It isn’t the same as suppressing or dampening your emotions.

For example, if you have good emotion regulation and something makes you angry, you might take a moment to identify the feeling, sit with it, and let it pass so that you can think more clearly about a solution to the angering problem. You might still feel like shouting or lashing out, but you don’t act on those impulses.

Emotion regulation is a skill – this means that anyone can learn it, but some people do find it easier than others. Some people learn how to healthily regulate emotions in childhood from emotionally regulated caregivers, while others have to learn later in life.

People with certain conditions or neurodivergent diagnoses, such as borderline personality disorder, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder can experience intense emotions and find it particularly difficult to practice emotion regulation¹. This doesn’t mean that they can’t learn good emotion regulation skills, but there are extra roadblocks on the way.

What is Emotion Regulation in the Workplace?

The typical workplace is full of stressors that can trigger difficult emotions; if we’re not good at regulating them, we can experience all sorts of consequences in our personal and professional lives. Poorer emotion regulation at work has been shown to predict greater stress², burnout risk³, and poorer physical health⁴.

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Emotion regulation is also strongly implicated in attachment patterns – secure attachments are typically linked to better emotion regulation skills, because attachment security gives us a safe base to experience strong emotions from.

Because of its importance in the workplace and connections to attachment theory, we decided to include emotion regulation in our exploration of attachment, personal experiences, and the workplace – the Attachment at Work study.

About Our Attachment at Work Study

Our Attachment at Work study aimed to find out how your workplace attachment style – how anxious or avoidant your attachment is to your colleagues – relates to your experiences at work and in your inner life.

First, we undertook 5 rounds of trialling different variations of questions to measure attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance in the workplace. From this trialling process, we were able to identify a set of questions that successfully measure attachment at work as a new idea, separate to the attachment we experience with our romantic partners, family, or friends!

64,240 people took part in our study across several different surveys, answering different sets of questions to make up our complete set of data.

For a detailed overview of the Attachment at Work study, check out our article: What is Attachment at Work?

To investigate emotion regulation, we used the short-form Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS-16), developed by Bjureberg et al. in 2016⁵ and based on the original DERS created by Gratz and Roemer in 2004⁶. This measure refers to your general emotion regulation, not specific to the workplace.

High scores on the DERS-16 scale indicate greater difficulties with emotion regulation on each of its 5 subscales:

Nonacceptance of Emotional Responses: negative emotions are rejected, causing more negative emotions such as shame or frustration.
Difficulties Engaging in Goal-Directed Behavior: negative emotions distract from other tasks.
Impulse Control Difficulties: difficulty avoiding acting on urges driven by negative emotions.
Limited Access to Emotion Regulation Strategies: believing emotions cannot be effectively regulated.
Lack of Emotional Clarity: unable to clearly identify emotions being experienced.

We compared these scores against workplace attachment anxiety and workplace attachment avoidance scores to find out if there was any relationship between them.

Emotion Regulation and Attachment at Work

Our results found that both workplace attachment anxiety and workplace attachment avoidance were associated with higher scores on the DERS across the board – in other words, people who were more securely attached to their colleagues had fewer difficulties in all 5 subscales of emotion regulation.

This makes sense, as we already know that secure attachment styles are typically associated with better emotion regulation skills. If we feel securely attached to our colleagues, we likely feel more supported by our team, which can make it easier to accept our own negative emotions because we believe they’ll be accepted by others. This sets the foundation for us to be able to recognize our emotions and control the impulses that come with them, helping us to focus on our work and supporting our belief that we can emotionally regulate.

Interestingly, our results found differences between workplace attachment anxiety and workplace attachment avoidance when it comes to the strength of their relationships with emotion regulation.

Emotion Regulation and Workplace Attachment Anxiety

We found that workplace attachment anxiety was more strongly correlated with emotion regulation than workplace attachment avoidance in all 5 subscales – the higher people scored on workplace attachment anxiety, the higher they scored on emotion regulation difficulties.

Overall, the relationship between workplace attachment anxiety and emotion regulation was 88% stronger than the relationship between workplace attachment avoidance and emotion regulation.

This reflects similar patterns in romantic attachments – attachment anxiety is typically associated with intense emotions and a tendency to act on them, because we learn that displays of strong emotion help us to meet our needs. As infants, this is adaptive because it helps us to survive, but as adults, it can create ruptures in relationships and cause us to act in ways we usually wouldn’t.

Emotion Regulation and Workplace Attachment Avoidance

Attachment avoidance, on the other hand, is associated with a dampening or “pushing down” of emotional responses. On the surface, people with avoidant attachment styles can seem calm and collected no matter what kind of conflict they’re experiencing. So why is workplace attachment avoidance still related to poorer emotion regulation?

Although attachment avoidance involves constructing emotional defences, studies have shown that these tend to fall apart when put under stress⁷. When we look at the subscales of emotion regulation, we can see how they conflict with avoidance: nonacceptance of emotional responses is typical of attachment avoidance, as are limited access to emotion regulation strategies and lack of emotional clarity.

Therefore, although the intense emotions associated with attachment anxiety are not present in attachment avoidance, we still see a relationship (although a weaker one) between workplace attachment avoidance and emotion regulation difficulties because the avoidance of emotions is not the same as regulating them.

Other Factors in Emotion Regulation

Finally, we wanted to explore whether your personal experiences could relate to emotion regulation. To do this, we looked at differences in DERS-16 scores depending on workplace setup (remote/hybrid/full-time office-based), professional status, gender, and parenthood status. Remember that higher scores mean greater challenges in each domain.

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Office workers had slightly higher scores on Lack of Emotional Clarity, Impulse Control Difficulties, Limited Access to Emotion Regulation Strategies and Nonacceptance of Emotional Responses, as well as overall, compared with hybrid and remote workers.

Contractors scored higher on the DERS-16 than business owners, but lower than employed non-managers. Employed managers had slightly lower scores than employed non-managers and contractors.

Women scored higher than men on all subscales, which may reflect greater stressors and higher pressure at work. People with children also score slightly higher on all subscales than people without children, which may again indicate higher emotional demands.

Is Your Workplace Attachment Pattern Influencing Your Emotion Regulation?

Emotion regulation is an important skill to learn for maintaining healthy relationships – including in the workplace. Although our results don’t tell us the direction of the relationship (whether workplace attachment insecurity leads to emotional regulation difficulties or vice versa), working on more secure Attachment at Work could lead to better emotion regulation.

If you want to know your or your team’s Attachment at Work, emotion regulation, and related patterns like burnout risk and job satisfaction, take our Attachment at Work test. This will give you a deep insight into your unique workplace dynamics, including science-based actionable tips to work towards a happier, healthier workplace.

References

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Maffett AJ, Paull DN, Skeel RL, Kraysovic JN, Hatch B, O’Mahony S, Gerhart JI. Emotion dysregulation and workplace satisfaction in direct care worker burnout and abuse risk. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association. 2022 Jul 1;23(7):1257-61.
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Bjureberg J, Ljótsson B, Tull MT, Hedman E, Sahlin H, Lundh LG, Bjärehed J, DiLillo D, Messman-Moore T, Gumpert CH, Gratz KL. Development and validation of a brief version of the difficulties in emotion regulation scale: the DERS-16. Journal of psychopathology and behavioral assessment. 2016 Jun;38(2):284-96.
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