In the world of emotions, trait affect refers to the predisposition some people have to generally experience positive or negative emotions. Trait affect is often broken up into negative affect and positive affect. While high levels of negative affect are associated with negative emotions such as fear and anxiety, high levels of positive affect are associated with positive emotions such as excitement and joy. It should not come as a surprise that positive affect tends to relate favorably to work performance whereas the opposite is true for negative affect.
THE RESEARCH STUDY
Recently, researchers (Johnson et al., 2010) suggested that because trait affect operates outside of employees’ conscious awareness, it is more appropriate to measure it at the unconscious or implicit level. This is in stark contrast to the self-report, explicit measurement of trait affect that is typically used when explicitly asking people to rate the extent to which they feel certain emotions across many different situations.
But how do researchers measure trait affect implicitly? For this study, the researchers used a word completion task that presented word fragments to employees and asked them to create a meaningful English word. The words chosen by the participant indicated whether they had more positive affect or negative affect. For example, when presented with: F E _ _ , participants could fill in the word FEAR, indicating negative affect, or FEED, which is neutral. As another example, when presented with S M _ _ _ , participants could fill in the world SMILE, which indicates positive affect, or SMART, which is neutral. The researchers conducted two independent pilot studies that supported the validity of their word fragment approach.
Ultimately, the researchers demonstrated that implicit measures of trait affect are important predictors of task performance, organizational citizenship behavior (going the extra mile) and counterproductive work behaviors, even more so than the conscious/explicit measures that we are more accustomed to.
THE BOTTOM LINE
This study highlights an interesting way to measure employees’ predispositions to experience positive and negative emotions. In addition, while employees can easily misrepresent themselves on explicit personality measures, this is likely not possible for implicit measures.
Johnson, R.E., Tolentino, A.L., Rodopman, O.B., & Cho, E. (2010). We (sometimes) know not how we feel: Predicting job performance with an implicit measure of trait affectivity. Personnel Psychology, 63 (1), 197-219.
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