Positive and Negative Affect as Moderators of the Job Satisfaction-Job Attitudes Relationship

B.R. Staw, in an article in Administrative Sciences, Quarterly, called for a dispositional approach to the study of job attitudes, arguing that deposition or affect may supersede the influences of the situation in the formulation of job satisfaction. In assessing that position, the present experiment measured positive and negative affect, job satisfaction, and several perceptions of the work context among 76 workers at the Armstrong Laboratory, Aircrew Training Research Division, Williams Air Force Base, Arizona. Results of correlation and regression analyses show that positive and negative affect accounted for significant variance in neither job satisfaction nor the situation variables. These affects added little unique variance over situation measure to the prediction of job satisfaction. however, further analyses show that both positive and negative affect moderated the relationships between job satisfaction and some of the situation variables. The data provide limited support for Staws assertion that situation-focused organization development interventions, designed to promote job satisfaction may be prone to failure because they do not account for dispositional differences among employees.