How managers can unintentionally disadvantage employees with mental illness: An extrinsic interpersonal emotion...

Extensive scholarly attention has focused on how employees with mental illness can face barriers in the workplace (e.g., stigmatizing perceptions, such as perceiving those with mental illness as incompetent, dangerous, or lacking resilience). Drawing on interpersonal emotion regulation motivation theory, we explore whether managers may unintentionally disadvantage employees with mental illness via interpersonal emotion regulation. Our general argument is that managers may perceive that employees with mental illness are less able to regulate negative emotions in challenging situations (e.g., receiving negative performance feedback). This can prompt managers to fear for their employees' well-being and engage in interpersonal emotional regulation by reducing the quality of negative performance feedback that they provide. We also examine whether activating a coaching motive (i.e., enhancing managers' awareness related to the importance of providing all employees with high-quality negative feedback) can overcome these effects. To empirically test our model, we develop and validate scales for our proposed mechanisms: perceived negative emotion regulation inability and fear for well-being. Using samples with managerial experience from the United States and Canada (N = 1,303), we test our hypotheses across three studies. Theoretical and practical implications include recognizing why and how employees with mental illness may face subtle disadvantages in the workplace due to interpersonal emotion regulation, understanding what motivates managers to engage in extrinsic interpersonal emotional regulation for employees with mental illness, and showcasing how reducing the subtle disadvantages employees with mental illness experience may be especially difficult. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).