Four-quadrant investigation of job-related affects and behaviours

Abstract

Emphasizing differences in activation as well as valence, six studies across a range of situations examined relations between types of job-related core affect and 13 self-reported work behaviours. A theory-based measure of affect was developed, and its four-quadrant structure was found to be supported across studies. Also consistent with hypotheses, high-activation pleasant affect was more strongly correlated with positive behaviours than were low-activation pleasant feelings, and those associations tended to be greatest for discretionary behaviours in contrast to routine task proficiency. Additionally as predicted, unpleasant job-related affects that had low rather than high activation were more strongly linked to the negative work behaviours examined. Theory and practice would benefit from greater differentiation between affects and between behaviours.

Keywords:

• Affect
• Behaviour
• Citizenship
• Mood
• Performance
• Proactivity

Notes

¹A separate subset of material from Studies 4 and 5 has been used by Bindl et al. (2012) to examine a different set of issues.

²Because readers might be concerned about the scale having some ordinal properties, we additionally replicated the CFAs using items’ polychoric correlation matrix in combination with Weighted Least Squares estimation (WLMRV) in MPlus version 6.1. All of these additional analyses provided strong support for our hypothesized four-factor affect structure in comparison to alternative affect structures.

³Other affect quadrants outside a stated hypothesis were also controlled in all analyses, except for Study 1. In that case, high between-variable correlations rendered the extra control inappropriate. In all the other studies, patterns were almost identical with and without control for the additional quadrants.

⁴Although HAPA is shown in Appendix A to be strongly associated with negative behaviours as well as with positive behaviours, the more refined comparison in Study 6 of our freely estimated model with a model in which paths between HAPA and positive and negative behaviours are constrained equal revealed that HAPA is in these more controlled conditions significantly more strongly associated with positive behaviours than with negative ones (see also Figure 7).