Cross-National Explorations of the Impact of Affect at Work Using the State-Trait Emotion Measure: A Coordinated Series of Studies in the United States, China, and Romania

Abstract

This series of studies using samples drawn in three diverse cultural contexts—the United States, China, and Romania—focused on the role of discrete emotion feelings (Izard, 2009) in predicting job satisfaction and performance. Our research goals required that we develop and validate a new measure, the State-Trait Emotion Measure (STEM), which provides assessments of a diverse array of discrete emotion feelings, dispositions corresponding to these, and aggregations of these to index state and trait positive and negative affect. Positive evidence for STEM's validity allowed for rigorous tests of hypotheses, which revealed, consistently across countries, that discrete emotion feelings show variations in their relationships with outcomes of performance and satisfaction and add incrementally to their prediction over dimensional measures of positive and negative affect. At the same time, the patterns of relationships across countries (e.g., positive relationships between positive emotion feelings and job satisfaction) were consistent with past research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Xian Xu is now with IBM in Shanghai, China. Separate papers on the research conducted in each country were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 2005 (the U.S. study) and 2007 (the studies in China and Romania). We thank David Watson and Paul Spector for their comments on an earlier version of the paper on the U.S. study and Gabriel Lopez-Rivas for his efforts in drawing the sample and analyzing the data for the U.S. study.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Dr. Horia D. Pitariu, who passed away in March 2010.