A Longitudinal Person-Centered Perspective on Positive and Negative Affect at Work

Abstract

This research examines how the direction and intensity of employee's positive and negative affect at work combine within different profiles, and the relations between these profiles and theoreticallyrelevant predictors (psychological need satisfaction and supervisor autonomy support) and outcomes (work-family conflict, absenteeism, and turnover intentions). A total sample of 491 firefighters completed our measures initially, and 139 of those completed the same measures again four months later, allowing us to examine the stability of these affect profiles over time. Latent profile analyses and latent transition analyses revealed five identical profiles across the two measurements occasions:

Emotional anticipation of future vocational transitions: A person-centered approach

“…The present research extends this line of inquiry. It thus complements previous work that applied a person-centered perspective on emotions in various contexts such as work (Sandrin et al, 2020), high school courses (Ganotice et al, 2016;K. A. Robinson et al, 2020), university courses (K. A.…”

“…In a laboratory experiment, Siemer et al (2007) showed that participants' emotion profiles in reaction to an ambiguous negative experience were concurrent and naturally aligned with specific sets of cognitive appraisals of the situation. In the work context, Sandrin et al (2020) recently showed the emergence of five distinct profiles of positive and negative affect along with self-perceptions of their impact on job performance. Profiles were relatively stable over time and were meaningfully associated with work-family conflict, absenteeism, and turnover intentions.…”

“…Our findings are partially consistent with previous research that adopted a longitudinal person-centered approach to emotions. For example, in a work context, Sandrin et al (2020) found that profiles of affect were stable both in number and shape across a time interval of four months. However, they found that the degree of interpersonal differences within profiles (i.e., dispersion similarity) and the sizes of the profiles (i.e., distributional similarity) changed over time.…”

“…Second, our research also responds to calls for a complex picture of individuals' multiple emotional experiences using person-centered approaches. If previous person-centered research has already stressed the importance of examining the combinations of multiple emotions in various situations such as learning (Tze et al, 2020), prosocial behaviors (Fernando et al, 2014), at work (Sandrin et al, 2020), or during performance-related negative feedback (Siemer et al, 2007), to the best of our knowledge, no studies have investigated the profiles of both anticipatory and anticipated emotions at the prospect of vocational transitions. Notably, the work of Zampetakis et al (2016a) might represent an exception, but they did not study anticipatory emotions and focused exclusively on anticipated emotions in the context of venture creation among university students.…”

Emotional anticipation of future vocational transitions: A person-centered approach

“…Out of the five profiles they found in their study, three were found highly stable over time, and two were subjected to very high levels of transitions over time. Not only were our findings related to the anticipation of a future event, but Sandrin et al (2020) used a traitbased view of affect, which makes the comparisons between the two studies extremely difficult. However, it echoes our findings and shows that the replication and similarity of profiles across time points do not preclude individuals from making transitions between some profiles over time.…”