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Abstract
In spite of the recently growing interest in emotion among management scholars, emotion is still largely neglected in existing theories of work motivation that provide foundational explanations about why and how people behave in particular ways in their workplace. In this research, I expand existing understandings of work motivation by investigating the role of core affective experience (defined as the most elementary feelings of pleasure or displeasure, activation or deactivation) in work motivation.
I developed and ran an Internet-based stock investment simulation combined with an experience sampling method, in which more than 100 investors participated daily for twenty consecutive business days. The results mostly supported my prediction that core affective feelings of pleasantness and activation would affect three major behavioral outcomes associated with work motivation: (1) its direction (what a person does/choice of behavior), (2) intensity (how hard a person works/amount of effort) and (3) persistence (the degree to which a person maintains the initially chosen behaviors/duration of behavioral choice).
First, core affective feelings influenced the direction aspect of work motivation, especially its generative-defensive dimension. I found that people experiencing more pleasant affective feelings expected higher performance outcomes (expectancy judgments) and perceived obtaining those outcomes more attractive (utility judgments), and as a result, they behaved more generatively, focusing more on achieving positive outcomes (gain) than avoiding negative outcomes (loss) (generative-defensiveness in action). On the other hand, when people felt more activated, whether those feelings were pleasant or unpleasant, they behaved defensively.
Second, core affective experience influenced the amount of effort, the intensity aspect of work motivation. More pleasant feelings led to higher expectancy judgments and higher utility judgments, which in turn, promoted higher performance goals (goal level) and ultimately more effort on the tasks (the amount of effort).
Third, core affective experience influenced the duration of action, the persistence aspect of work motivation. More pleasant feelings led to more favorable progress judgments, which in turn led to greater degrees of duration in action (e.g., people tended to maintain their existing investment portfolios). In addition, the activation dimension of core affect significantly and negatively affected the duration of action, which indicates that people are more likely to change their initial choice of actions, instead of maintaining them, when they are emotionally activated.
These effects mostly remained unchanged even after controlling for group influence (investment clubs), daily market movement, and daily performance feedback. Moreover, I found that age, an individual-level demographic variable, moderated the relationships between pleasantness in core affect and several other variables. In particular, the effects of pleasantness on expectancy judgment, progress judgment, and generative-defensive orientation were greater for older participants, whereas the effect of pleasantness on the amount of effort was greater for younger participants.
These findings indicate that the role of affective experience in work motivation is both essential and extensive; it influences work behaviors both directly and indirectly through affecting several key judgment components and goal properties. This study provides a number of implications for work motivation theory and also for organizational behavior and behavioral finance.
