Mood and emotions while working: missing pieces of job satisfaction?

Abstract

Job satisfaction is often described as an affective response to one's job, but is usually measured largely as a cognitive evaluation of job features. This paper explores several hypothesized relationships between real time affect while working and standard measures of job satisfaction. Experience sampling methodology was used to obtain up to 50 reports of immediate mood and emotions from 121 employed persons over a two week period. As expected, real time affect is related to overall satisfaction but is not identical to satisfaction. Moment to moment affect is more strongly related to a faces measure of satisfaction than to more verbal measures of satisfaction. Positive and negative emotions both make unique contributions to predicting overall satisfaction, and affect accounts for variance in overall satisfaction above and beyond facet satisfactions. Frequency of net positive emotion is a stronger predictor of overall satisfaction than is intensity of positive emotion. It is concluded that affect while working is a missing piece of overall job attitude, as well as a phenomenon worthy of investigation in its own right. Implications for further research and for improving the conceptualization and measurement of job satisfaction are discussed. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.