We’ve seen that emotions and moods are an important part of our personal and work lives. But how do they influence our job performance and satisfaction? Affective events theory (AET) proposes that employees react emotionally to things that happen to them at work, and this reaction influences their job performance and satisfaction.54 Say you just found out your company is downsizing. You might experience a variety of negative emotions, causing you to worry that you’ll lose your job. Because it is out of your hands, you may feel insecure and fearful, and spend much of your time worrying rather than working. Needless to say, your job satisfaction will also be down.

Work events trigger positive or negative emotional reactions, to which employees’ personalities and moods predispose them to respond with greater or lesser intensity.55 People who score low on emotional stability (see Chapter 5) are more likely to react strongly to negative events, and an emotional response to a given event can depend on mood. Finally, emotions influence a number of performance and satisfaction variables, such as OCB, organizational commitment, level of effort, intention to quit, and workplace deviance.

In sum, AET offers two important messages.56 First, emotions provide valuable insights into how workplace events influence employee performance and satisfaction. Second, employees and managers shouldn’t ignore emotions or the events that cause them, even when they appear minor, because they accumulate. The AET framework highlights the emotionality of the workplace and its real outcomes. Emotional intelligence is another framework that may help us understand the impact of emotions on job performance, so we look at that next.