Affective Events Theory - Mood and AET

Mood and AET

Workers' mood influences their job performance and job satisfaction. Hedonic tone explains most of the variation in how an event at work affects a worker's internal state (i.e., mood) and how this state is expressed to others. Even though positive events are reported three to five times more often, negative events have approximately five times the impact on mood. An inverse relationship exists between hedonic tone and work affect, with hedonic tone negatively-related to work performance and positively-related to work withdrawal. Workers are likely be selfless and more altruistic when positive events occur, such as compliments, open acknowledgement of a job well-done, and promotions (which, in turn, seem to improve job performance). Negative events at work, however, are likely to cause negative mood in employees, resulting in negative work behaviours such as work slowdowns, work withdrawal, and absenteeism.

Mood may be moderated by organizational commitment which, in turn, may affect workers' decisions to stay or quit. For example, workers may suppress their true feelings and choose to dissociate their mood at work if they are high in continuance organizational commitment (i.e., committed due to social or economic costs of leaving). The same may be true for workers who are high in affective organizational commitment, which is typically the case for workers who are highly affiliated with their organizations (e.g., workers who have a family history of working for the same organization or who believe deeply in the organization's values or cause). Similarly, workers who are high in normative organizational commitment feel they have to put up with less-than-favourable work environmental conditions because of contractual obligations.

Research demonstrates that employee mood is a strong predictor of job satisfaction. Neuroticism and extraversion explain a lot of the variation in individual differences in job satisfaction, with variation in mood and job satisfaction accurately predicting an individual worker's level of neuroticism. There is also some indication that individuals may be predisposed to perceive events that occur at work as either negative or positive. The effect of positive events on job satisfaction is weaker among workers with high negative mood predisposition than those with low negative mood predisposition.

This predisposition to either be optimistic or pessimistic about job satisfaction may frame the job even before positive or negative events occur at work. To rule out the possibility of hiring personnel who come to the job with a negative outlook, the personality of potential employees should be evaluated through the use of standardized self-report personality inventories (e.g., NEO-PI-R) during the hiring process. Highly conscientious, agreeable, or extraverted personnel tend to be more satisfied with their jobs and, by extension, tend to stay longer in organizations. Alternatively, organizations may develop their own structured interview questions with behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) that provide further convergent validity on critical predictors of job performance (e.g., neuroticism). Such inventories, interviews, and tests must be reliable and valid in order to demonstrate their utility and legal defensibility in support of the selection and hiring process.