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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Positive and Negetive Affect on Work environment!

In the last blog, we looked at self-monitoring characteristics of an individual and what does it imply in an organizational context. In today's blog, we look at Positive/Negative Affect and attempt understanding what this would mean for an organization.

A look at the people around us, and a brief reflection on the experience we had working or sharing some time with them would broadly help us to recollect - 1that with some people, we felt a positive energy to work with, and with some others we were so bogged down by the cribbing and negativity that they spread. In today's blog this is the very subject matter.

Positive Affect refers to the individual's tendency to accentuate the positive aspects of himself or herself, other people and the world in general. Negative Affect refers to an individual's tendency to accentuate the negative aspects of him or herself other people and the world in general.

Positive Affect is generally also linked with job satisfaction; such individuals are found to absent themselves from work to a lower extent than the people with negative affect people. Positive Affect is definitely a very positive asset in a work environment. Managers stretch the extra mile to ensure that positive affect is promoted - this also includes incorporating a participative decision making style. Negative Affect increases work stress.

While discussing the Positive and Negative Affect, it is important not to forget the impact of situations on the work we do. If the situation tends to overwhelm the affects of individual personalities then we call it as strong situation. All individuals more or less interpret the situation in a similar manner, and behave more or less in the same way. A weak situation in contrast has multiple interpretations; the situation doesn’t define what the appropriate response has to be.

Research has found that Organizations present a combination of strong and weak situations and therefore personality would have a stronger effect on behavior in some situations than in others.

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