| Summary: | Prior research has looked at emotions in organizational life mostly at the individual
level, providing us with little information about their role as a contextual factor in
organizations. In this dissertation, I sought to fill this gap by developing the concept of
emotional fit which I define as the congruence between the activation levels of an
employee's affective trait and the emotional climate of their workplace environment.
Drawing on a number of streams of research including the circumplex model of
affect, activation theory, emotional exhaustion, psychological safety, and ego depletion
theory, I developed and empirically tested a model analyzing how emotional fit affects an
employee's psychological and behavioral engagement at work. The model proposes that
emotional fit is positively related to an employee's connection with others, connection
with work, and performance through the mediating effects of emotional exhaustion and
psychological safety.
To test the theoretical model, I conducted a cross-level field study. The research
design is cross-level in that one component (i.e. emotional climate) of the independent
variable (i.e. emotional fit) was analyzed at the level of the workplace context and then
was compared with the other component (i.e. affective trait), measured at the level of the
individual employee. I collected data from 257 employees within 40 work units across a
variety of companies operating in sectors such as trade, forestry, high-tech, finance, and
courier service. The data regarding the task and role performance of employees were
collected from supervisors. Overall, the results show that an employee's degree of emotional fit is positively
related to his/her psychological engagement at work with regards to connection with
others and connection with work, but not task and role performance. In terms of
connection with others, emotional fit was positively related to commitment and
negatively related to surface acting. As for the connection with work domain, emotional
fit was negatively related to psychological withdrawal behaviors and intention for
turnover. Supporting the theoretical model, these relationships were mediated by
emotional exhaustion and psychological safety. === Business, Sauder School of === Graduate
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