Do Affective Dynamic Features Predict Job Performance?

The affective revolution in the organizational sciences, along with methodological advances in experience sampling, has led to a greater theoretical interest in the temporal dynamics of affect (e.g., variability, inertia, instability). Related research in health and personality psychology suggests that temporal parameters of affect are predictive of well-being. However, despite the theoretical and methodological appeal, recent work suggests that affective dynamic features are not predictive of broad well-being outcomes beyond the mean level. Given the practical and methodological costs of examining affective dynamic features in organizational research, I seek to determine (a) the predictive validity of these different types of dynamic features on job performance (task performance, organizational citizenship behavior [OCB], and counterproductive work behavior [CWB]); and (b) the incremental value of dynamic features over mean levels of affect. To do so, I assess three key temporal parameters of affect (variability, inertia, instability) from daily diary assessments of affect from 597 workers (mean days = 51, total assessments = 30,565), looking at both weekly and overall levels. The findings suggest that affective dynamic features measured at the overall level were predictive of within-person variability in task performance and counterproductive work behavior (as well as mean CWB), even after controlling for the mean. Therefore, empirical and theoretical looks at affective dynamic features of employees may inform our understanding of their short-term performance variability.