How to feel in order to be satisfied at work? A differentiating view on the Affective Events Theory

Affective Events Theory (AET; Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996) states that emotions at work affect job satisfaction. We specified existing research by distinguishing between frequency and intensity of emotional episodes at work and by varying the time frame for which emotions were reported. In a paper-pencil study employed persons (N = 228) reported the frequency and the intensity of positive and negative work-related affective states. The time period, for which emotions were reported, was varied between subjects (last week vs. last month). When predicting job satisfaction, regression analyses indicated that (1) the frequency of emotions is a better predictor than their intensity and that (2) positive emotions are a better predictor than negative emotions when reporting affective states for the last week, whereas this pattern reverses for the time frame of last month. Thus, with an increasing time interval, negative emotions seem to have a comparatively better cognitive representation

An Affective Events Theory Analysis of Conflict Perception Emergence

Popular conceptualizations of conflict conflate conflict perception with other discrete constructs such as disagreement and emotions. This makes research using those conceptualizations difficult to interpret. I invoke affective events theory to describe how constructs conflated with conflict perception, as well as negative prescriptive expectancy violations (EVs), may collectively serve as antecedents to conflict perception. By reconceptualizing conflict perception as an evaluative judgment and distinguishing between episodic (short-term) and global (long-term) conflict perceptions, my model describes how episodic conflict perceptions cumulatively influence global conflict perceptions over time. Two types of events (disagreements and negative prescriptive EVs) were proposed to predict episodic conflict perceptions through motive inconsistent emotions. Disagreements were expected to positively predict episodic conflict perceptions when disagreement outcome favorability is low and negatively predict job satisfaction when disagreement outcome favorability is high. A pilot study provided initial support for the validity of the main study measures. Then, a three-phase longitudinal design was used to collect data from employed undergraduate participants reporting on supervisory relationships. In Phase 1, training for daily surveys was completed. In Phase 2, participants completed ten daily self-report measures of negative prescriptive EVs, disagreements, outcome favorability, emotions, and episodic conflict perceptions. In Phase 3, global conflict perception and job satisfaction were assessed. This method allowed for an examination of multilevel emergence between repeated measures variables at Level 1 (negative prescriptive EVs, disagreements, motive inconsistent emotions, episodic conflict perceptions) and single measures variables at Level 2 (global conflict perception, job satisfaction). Data was analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and multilevel regression. Results generally support the proposed model. However, the nature of the interactions between disagreements and outcome favorability on motive inconsistent emotions, motive consistent emotions, and on job satisfaction were different than expected. Implications and future directions are discussed

Reactions to psychological contract breaches and organizational citizenship behaviours: An experimental manipulation of severity

Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Grounded in affective events theory, we investigated the effects of experimentally manipulated psychological contract breaches on participants\u27 feelings of violation, subsequent perceptions of psychological contract strength, and organizational citizenship behaviours in a sample of working adults. Results support previous findings that pre-existing relational psychological contract strength interacts with severity of unmet promises or expectations. Specifically, individuals with high relational contracts who experience low severity of unmet promises/expectations have the lowest breach perceptions, whereas individuals with high relational contracts who experience more severe levels unmet promises/expectations experience the highest level of breach perceptions. Results also support the concept of a breach spiral in that prior perceptions of breach led to an increased likelihood of subsequent perceptions of breach following the experimental manipulation. Furthermore, consistent with affective events theory, results support the argument that a psychological contract breach\u27s effect on specific organizational citizenship behaviours is mediated by feelings of violation and the reassessment of relational contracts. These effects were present even after controlling for the direct effects of the manipulated severity of unmet promises/expectations

Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering

For more than 30 years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has rarely been verified in software engineering research, which faces an additional challenge in comparison to more traditional engineering fields: software development is an intellectual activity and is dominated by often-neglected human aspects. Among the skills required for software development, developers must possess high analytical problem-solving skills and creativity for the software construction process. According to psychology research, affects-emotions and moods-deeply influence the cognitive processing abilities and performance of workers, including creativity and analytical problem solving. Nonetheless, little research has investigated the correlation between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving performance of programmers. This article echoes the call to employ psychological measurements in software engineering research. We report a study with 42 participants to investigate the relationship between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving skills of software developers. The results offer support for the claim that happy developers are indeed better problem solvers in terms of their analytical abilities. The following contributions are made by this study: (1) providing a better understanding of the impact of affective states on the creativity and analytical problem-solving capacities of developers, (2) introducing and validating psychological measurements, theories, and concepts of affective states, creativity, and analytical-problem-solving skills in empirical software engineering, and (3) raising the need for studying the human factors of software engineering by employing a multidisciplinary viewpoint.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figures, published at Peer

Mood and creativity: an appraisal tendency perspective

There is a strong relationship between the mood one is in, and the way one performs creatively. Previous research has shown that this relationship is complex. In this paper we argue that this complexity partly lies in a faulty conceptualization of mood. We will argue that an appraisal tendency perspective on moods will help to further clarify the relationship between mood and creativity. To support this argument we will highlight some inconsistencies in previous research, and use the appraisal tendency perspective on mood to develop predictions that help explain these inconsistencies and develop new directions for mood-creativity research. Future research is required to assess the accuracy of these predictions

How Do You Feel, Developer? An Explanatory Theory of the Impact of Affects on Programming Performance

Affects---emotions and moods---have an impact on cognitive activities and the working performance of individuals. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processes, yet software engineering research lacks theory on affects and their impact on software development activities. In this paper, we report on an interpretive study aimed at broadening our understanding of the psychology of programming in terms of the experience of affects while programming, and the impact of affects on programming performance. We conducted a qualitative interpretive study based on: face-to-face open-ended interviews, in-field observations, and e-mail exchanges. This enabled us to construct a novel explanatory theory of the impact of affects on development performance. The theory is explicated using an established taxonomy framework. The proposed theory builds upon the concepts of events, affects, attractors, focus, goals, and performance. Theoretical and practical implications are given.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures. Postprin

Ranking and Selecting Multi-Hop Knowledge Paths to Better Predict Human Needs

To make machines better understand sentiments, research needs to move from polarity identification to understanding the reasons that underlie the expression of sentiment. Categorizing the goals or needs of humans is one way to explain the expression of sentiment in text. Humans are good at understanding situations described in natural language and can easily connect them to the character's psychological needs using commonsense knowledge. We present a novel method to extract, rank, filter and select multi-hop relation paths from a commonsense knowledge resource to interpret the expression of sentiment in terms of their underlying human needs. We efficiently integrate the acquired knowledge paths in a neural model that interfaces context representations with knowledge using a gated attention mechanism. We assess the model's performance on a recently published dataset for categorizing human needs. Selectively integrating knowledge paths boosts performance and establishes a new state-of-the-art. Our model offers interpretability through the learned attention map over commonsense knowledge paths. Human evaluation highlights the relevance of the encoded knowledge

Drivers and outcomes of work alienation: reviving a concept

This article sheds new light on an understudied construct in mainstream management theory, namely, work alienation. This is an important area of study because previous research indicates that work alienation is associated with important individual and organizational outcomes. We tested four antecedents of work alienation: decision-making autonomy, task variety, task identity, and social support. Moreover, we examined two outcomes of alienation: deviance and performance, the former measured 1 year after the independent variables were measured, and the latter as rated by supervisors. We present evidence from a sample of 283 employees employed at a construction and consultancy organization in the United Kingdom. The results supported the majority of our hypotheses, indicating that alienation is a worthy concept of exploration in the management sciences