An Investigation of Negative Appraisals Due to Negative Mood and How They Affect Satisfaction and Job Performance

• Main Author: Hudson, Cristina Keiko
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholar Commons 2012
• Subjects: Affective Events Theory; Emotions; Nonwork Stressors; Spillover; Work Events; Psychology
• Online Access: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4334; http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5530&context=etd

Ample research has investigated the relationship between non-work and work domains finding consistent links between stressors in one and strains in the other. Additionally, there exist explanatory models of these associations such as psychological/physical sickness and related absences and loss or fear of losing personal resources. The current investigation combined variables from the spillover model and Affective Events Theory to test a new model with negative mood at its core. It hypothesized marital and financial stressors lead to negative mood at home which spills over into the work domain resulting in relatively more negative appraisals of work events. Negative mood at work is a likely outcome, which in turn causes subsequent decreases in organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and job satisfaction and increases in counterproductive work behavior (CWB). Finally, the model proposed social support as a moderator buffering against the detriments of negative mood from home. Although structural equation modeling found the proposed model to be incorrect and to suffer from a large degree of misfit, examination of individual parameter estimates warranted the testing of two alternative models. Model 3 presented the best fit and most variance accounted for by omitting OCB and using direct paths from social support to all work variables (rather than the proposed moderating effect) and direct carryover of mood at home to mood at work. The majority of the paths tested in the model reasonably explained the data, although some variance remained unaccounted for. Results of model testing were also supported by significant correlations in the predicted direction between stressors and mood at home; mood at home and appraisals of work events; appraisals of work events and mood at work; and mood at work with job satisfaction and CWB. These results draw attention to the important role played by the individual's mood in the interplay between the work and non-work domains.