Personality Affect Construal Theory

Even decades after the affective revolution (Ashkanasy & Dorris, 2017), affect remains an integral part of organizational psychology. The two primary perspectives in affective research center on affect as a dispositional construct (ie a trait) or a momentary construct (ie a state)(Brief & Weiss, 2002). Dispositional perspectives of affect refer to a general tendency to experience certain types and levels of affective state. This can reflect personality traits and affective dispositions (Watson & Clark, 1984; Watson & Tellegen, 2002). Momentary affect refers to emotions experienced in the moment, including both the valence of feelings (ie positive, negative) and discrete emotions (eg guilt, awe). Integrating person, situation, and emotional construal perspectives, this chapter seeks to incorporate decades of work on affective dispositions, momentary affect, and personality to present a conceptual model that specifies how these come together to produce in-the-moment emotions embedded in specific situations. In doing so, we provide theoretical specificity connecting these dispositional and momentary perspectives, answering the call for more multi-level and systems-based theories: for example, how does personality unfold to impact state-level emotions (Ilies, Schwind, & Heller, 2007)?Within organizational research, earlier studies on affect often examined the relationship between dispositional affect and work outcomes, where high average levels of positive affectivity and low average levels of negative affectivity have been tied to better performance, including task performance (Kaplan, Bradley, Luchman, & Haynes, 2009), lower counterproductive work and …