Mood Repair and Maintenance at Work: A Scale Development and Theoretical Extension

Abstract

Although researchers have generally found that daily negative moods lead to harmful outcomes, in contrast, daily positive moods improve well-being and performance. It remains unclear how employees engage in mood regulation strategies to “repair” their negative moods or “maintain” positive moods. Drawing on the mood regulation literature, we employed three studies to develop a scale to measure employees’ mood regulation strategies and test the mood repair/maintenance hypotheses. In the pilot study, we followed Hinkin’s (1998) scale development process to generate seven mood regulation strategies by interviewing 138 full-time employees and collecting items from existing literature. In Study 1, the daily data was collected twice a day (i.e., 9:00 AM and 4:30 PM) from 108 employees across two consecutive weeks, resulting in 1022 valid daily responses. Study 1 results showed that engaging in positive social activities, negative social activities, and task-related activities (e.g., trying harder to solve problems) effectively maintain their positive moods. In Study 2, we collect daily data twice a day (i.e., 8:30 AM and 11:30 AM) from another independent sample composed of 106 full-time employees across two weeks (i.e., 987 valid daily responses). Then we constructively replicate the Study 1 findings by employing different measures and research design. Notably, we also included recovery- and task-related outcomes as potential mechanisms to explain the effects of mood regulation strategies. Theoretical implications for mood regulation and recovery literature are further discussed.