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There has been heightened interest in recent years in the individual differences approach to the study of job performance (Barrick & Mount, 2005; Huang, Zabel, Ryan, & Palmer, 2014) and turnover intentions (Thoresen, Kaplan, Barsky, Warren, & deChermont, 2003). Whereas most of the research in this area was previously concentrated on simply establishing the presence of some identifiable predispositions towards high/low work performance and turnover intentions, researchers have recently begun to explore in more detail the particular personality traits that may underlie these dispositional tendencies. Individual differences in affective tendencies are promising traits to examine because the effort that an individual puts into work and their unique work attitudes will produce different affective reactions (Cropanzano, James, & Konovsky, 1993; Yang & Diefendorff, 2009). In particular, negative affectivity (commonly abbreviated to NA), or the dispositional tendency of an individual to experience a variety of negative emotions across time and situations (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), has been considered as a focal individual difference variable when predicting job performance and turnover intentions (Thoresen et al., 2003; Kaplan, Bradley, Luchman, & Haynes, 2009; Johnson, Tolentino, Rodopman, & Cho, 2010).
Using theoretical and empirical arguments, this manuscript challenges the conventional wisdom that NA only has a dysfunctional and linear effect (for an extensive discussion see Johnson et al., 2010) on in-role job performance, here defined as job activities that contribute to the organization's technical core and appear in one's job description (Borman & Motowidlo, 1997), and turnover intentions, here conceptualized as an employee's intention to leave the organization (Shore & Martin, 1989). First, drawing upon formal theories of self-regulation, including control theory (Carver & Scheier, 2011), we postulate that NA provides critical information about whether or not additional effort is needed to realize particular goals. Successful self-regulation requires careful information processing about self and the environment, particularly negative information (Wrosch, Scheier, Miller, Schulz, & Carver, 2003; da Motta Veiga & Turban, 2014). Failing to assess or choosing to ignore negative information may have serious costs as it may indicate a lack of motivation to deal with the potential threats of goal achievement (Aspinwall, 1998). Borrowing from self-regulation theory, it is advocated that while NA can undermine work behaviour and...