Affective well-being and within-day beliefs about job demands' influence on work performance: An experience sampling study

Affective well-being is influenced by individuals' momentary beliefs concerning events' impact on goals. We examined within-day beliefs concerning problem-solving demands' adverse impact on an important work goal (work performance). Participants (N=68) provided data up to four times per day for one working week. Hourly beliefs about problem-solving demands' adverse impact on performance were associated with end-of-hour anxious affect and inversely associated with end-of-hour motivated pleasant affect. Practitioner Points Jobs cannot be treated as static entities with fixed characteristics that are interpreted in the same way by all people all of the time. In addition to environmental factors, job redesign interventions to enhance psychological well-being need to integrate information about dynamic, cognitive processes internal to the person and within-day temporal processes.