Are you happy with your job? That depends on the day of the week. "There's an underlying assumption that job satisfaction is a stable attitude," says Howard Weiss, Ph.D. But, says this associate professor of psychology at Purdue University, your contentment at work actually fluctuates constantly.
Weiss told 24 managers in a Midwestern office to fill out mood surveys four times a day for 16 days. He also asked them periodically about their job satisfaction. Subjects' moods and attitudes varied dramatically over the course of the study, he reports in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
There are two likely reasons: One is people's individual "affect intensity," or how strongly they experience their emotions, says Weiss. The higher the managers rated on affect intensity, the more their feelings at work fluctuated over time.
The second reason has to do with your company's character, which impacts your experience on the job. "Workplaces don't recognize how much they influence employees," says Weiss. "Downsizing, mergers and other factors keep their employees in heightened emotionality." And that can be bad for business. Rapidly changing emotions can dampen judgment processes, creativity, risk-taking and other mental states crucial to producing good work, says Weiss.
