Positive Work Events Research Articles

“Darling, You Won’t Believe What Happened at Work Today”: A Diary Study on Sharing Work Events Among Dual-Earner Couples

After work, employees often share their work experiences with their partners, yet the consequences of these work-related conversations remain poorly understood. In this study with dual-earner couples, we investigate the daily consequences of sharing positive and negative work events with a partner regarding both employees’ and their partners’ affect and work-related self-esteem. Throughout a workweek, 73 heterosexual dual-earner couples completed questionnaires after work and at bedtime. Dyadic multilevel analyses showed that sharing positive work events was positively associated with employees’ positive affect but not with partners’ positive affect. Sharing negative work events showed no significant association with the negative affect of either employees or partners. While sharing positive work events was not associated with employees’ self-esteem, it was negatively associated with partners’ self-esteem. Furthermore, sharing negative work events was negatively associated with partners’ self-esteem, but did not affect employees’ self-esteem. Our study extends existing research on work-related conversations, considering self-esteem as an outcome and adopting a dyadic perspective.

How and When Employees Proactively Extend the Benefits of Past Positive Work Events to Coworkers

Positive work events are ubiquitous and benefit employees in myriad ways. Notwithstanding, dominant theories of work events portray events as temporally bounded external happenings, and employees as immediate and reactive beneficiaries of events. Moreover, mainstream management theories suggest that positive work events are advantageous to direct beneficiaries, but not to others. In this paper, we challenge these existing theoretical tenets by integrating theory on self-conscious emotions and capitalization to posit that employees who engage in workplace interpersonal capitalization experience pride and subsequently share knowledge with their coworkers. Going further, we suggest that these effects are bounded by whether the disclosed positive work events are attributed to effort, and whether disclosers perceive responsiveness in their coworkers during capitalization. Stated differently, we maintain that employees can “rekindle the fire” of positive work events in terms of generating pride, which in turn motivates employees to “spread the flames” by sharing knowledge with coworkers. A source- and time-separated field study provides support for our hypotheses. Our work broadens current conceptualizations of positive work events by developing theory regarding how employees can proactively extend their past positive event benefits to themselves and ultimately to others.

Antecedents of COVID-19 rumination: A three-wave study.

The COVID‐19 pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of our lives and has caused a considerable rise in psychological complaints such as anxieties and depression. The majority of studies so far has focused on outcomes of the COVID‐19 pandemic. To augment current knowledge, we focus on the antecedents of COVID‐19 rumination. Specially, we examine how negative and positive work events prior to the outbreak influence individuals' coping capacity with regard to COVID‐19 (i.e., the extent to which individuals have recurrent negative thoughts about COVID‐19). Drawing on Conservation of Resources Theory (COR), we maintain that positive and negative work events prior to the pandemic can affect one's self‐efficacy experiences and in turn can impact recurrent negative thoughts about COVID‐19. Alongside exploring the proposed theoretical mediation model, we test one of the key assumptions of the COR theory: the notion of primacy of negative over positive affect that results from negative (vs. positive) work events. Three‐waved data was collected among Dutch employees (T1 = 302; T2 = 199; T3 = 171); two prior to the pandemic and one at the onset of the outbreak. Results showed that positive work events increased self‐efficacy, which in turn reduced COVID‐19 rumination. Contrary to the expectation of primacy of the effects of negative work events, we found no significant impact of negative work events on individuals' COVID‐19 rumination.

Significant Life Events and Career Sustainability: A Three-Wave Study

Over the last three decades, the professional landscape has changed, and career paths have become more plural, complex, and flexible, as well as less predictable. Consequently, career sustainability has become a major concern. Since the framework of sustainable careers captures the complexities of modern careers, we used it in the present study to understand how various types of significant life events (i.e., negative work events, negative nonwork events, positive work events, and positive nonwork events) hinder or foster career sustainability among 870 professionally active adults in Switzerland using a longitudinal design. We used repeated measures analysis of variance to study changes in health (i.e., self-rated health and stress at work), happiness (i.e., life satisfaction, quality of life, and job satisfaction), and productivity (i.e., employability and career prospects) by the type of significant life events over time, from 1 year before the event (T0) to 1 year after the event (T2). Results indicated that work events are important to consider when studying career sustainability as there is evidence for spillover effects from work to life. Specifically, experiencing positive work events seems to foster career sustainability, and these effects seem to be stronger than the negative effect of negative work or nonwork life events on health, happiness, and productivity.

“How old do you feel today at work?” Work-related drivers of subjective age in the workplace

ABSTRACT Most Western societies face the challenge of steadily ageing workforces. In recent decades, research on ageing has intensively focused on the subjective age concept to understand the challenges and risks of increasingly ageing workforces. Nevertheless, the subjective age construct is subject to several conceptual uncertainties, namely, regarding its stability and potential work-specific drivers of subjective age. We address these limitations by a) investigating the stability of subjective age in a worker sample, and b) identifying work-specific drivers (e.g., negative work events, positive work events, work stress) of subjective age perceptions. Building on social identity and lifespan theories, we test our conceptual assumptions with an online sample of 168 U.S. employees, applying growth curve modelling in a daily diary study over one workweek. Results indicate that subjective age is a mutable construct and varies between- and within-person in the course of a workweek. We identify positive work events and work stress as between-person drivers and negative work events as a within-person driver of subjective age. We discuss theoretical implications of these findings as well as consequences for practitioners.

The Daily Motivators: Positive Work Events, Psychological Needs Satisfaction, and Work Engagement

This study examines the motivational effects of daily positive work events. Drawing on self‐determination theory, we investigated the motivational mechanism of two clusters of commonly encountered positive work events—achievement and recognition events—from a within‐person perspective. Specifically, we argue that achievement events and recognition events influence subsequent work engagement through satisfying different psychological needs. We tested our model using experience‐sampling data from 200 full‐time employees over eight workdays. As hypothesised, after controlling for positive affect as an additional mediator, both achievement and recognition events had positive effects on work engagement through psychological needs satisfaction. The results also revealed that achievement and recognition work events had differentiated effects in satisfying different psychological needs. These results shed light on the motivational function of positive work events above and beyond the affective mechanism and explicate the processes through which different types of positive work events relate to work engagement.

You Spin Me Right Round: A Within-Person Examination of Affect Spin and Voluntary Work Behavior

The current study extends prior research on emotional dynamics within the workplace by examining workplace correlates of within-person affect spin—a form of variability in affect states. Drawing from affective events theory, the current study tests both concurrent and lagged associations between work events, daily affect spin, mood, and daily voluntary workplace behaviors in a 2-week daily diary study of 114 working adults. Multilevel analyses demonstrated that levels of daily affect spin were higher on days in which employees experienced mixed work events (i.e., both positive and negative work events on the same day) compared to days with only positive work events or no work events. Results revealed that daily affect spin was indirectly related to daily organizational citizenship behavior through lower pleasant mood. Lagged analyses suggest the effects of daily spin on mood and voluntary work behaviors may not carry over to the next day. Our findings build upon prior between-person research on affect spin by providing evidence that affect spin can be meaningfully assessed at the within-person level of analysis. Moreover, this article extends prior research and theory by showing that affect spin is an important correlate of workplace events, mood, and voluntary work behavior at the within-person level.

Daily shifts in regulatory focus: The influence of work events and implications for employee well‐being

SummaryAlthough theory suggests that regulatory focus fluctuates within person and such fluctuations impact employee well‐being, there is little empirical investigation of such propositions. These are important research questions to address because work events may elicit within‐person fluctuations in regulatory focus, which can then affect well‐being. The primary purpose of this study is to examine specific predictors of daily regulatory focus at work and the foci's impact on employee well‐being at work and home as indicated by mood and psychosomatic complaints, respectively. We present and test an overarching theoretical framework that integrates conservation of resources theory, the cognitive‐affective processing system framework, and regulatory focus theory to delineate why and when work events affect regulatory focus and how the foci affect well‐being. Consistent with our expectations, we found that positive work events positively predicted daily promotion focus, but this effect was weaker when employees had high‐quality relationships with leaders. Furthermore, daily regulatory focus was associated with employee well‐being (mood and psychosomatic complaints) such that (i) promotion focus improved well‐being; (ii) prevention focus reduced well‐being; and (iii) the effects of promotion focus on well‐being were strongest when prevention focus was low. We discuss theoretical and practical implications and offer directions for future research. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Effects of Achievement and Personal Recognition Events on State Work Engagement: A Dual-Path Model

To better understand the psychological effects of positive work events, we developed and examined an episodic process model that identifies motivational and affective mechanisms through which two t...

Capitalising on Positive Work Events by Sharing them at Home

The authors integrate existing theory on work–family integration and interpersonal capitalisation on positive work events by examining the effects of sharing positive work events with one's spouse on employee life satisfaction. A field study was conducted with 131 employees of a large Midwestern university, who completed surveys online. Participants provided accounts of their most important positive event during the prior week and indicated whether they had shared this event with their spouse. They also retrospectively rated their positive affect and life satisfaction over the course of the study. Results based on hierarchical regression analysis indicated that having shared that event with one's spouse was positively associated with positive affect and life satisfaction after controlling for personality and event characteristics. These results were corroborated in a subsample of 99 employees whose spouses provided independent reports of whether the event was shared with them. This research reveals that sharing positive events with others has unique and significant contributions to positive affect and life satisfaction. More importantly, these findings show that the interpersonal act of sharing is effective when conducted cross‐domain: the act of sharing positive work events with family members increases positive affect and life satisfaction.

Development and validation of a negative and positive work events taxonomy using concept mapping

Affective events theory highlights the importance of work events as antecedents of distinct emotions, attitudes and work behavior. However, a comprehensive picture on the kind of events that occur ...

Work–family interpersonal capitalization: Sharing positive work events at home

In a 3-week experience-sampling study of 52 full-time employees, the authors investigated the within-individual relationships among positive work events, affective states, and job satisfaction. They also examined the influence of work–family interpersonal capitalization (sharing work events with one’s spouse or partner at home) on employees’ job and relationship satisfaction. Results revealed that positive events influenced job satisfaction through positive affect, and work–family interpersonal capitalization on the most positive work event of the day positively impacted job satisfaction over and above the effects of the event’s pleasantness and of the number of other positive work events experienced that day.