Hector P. Madrid

Leader Affective Presence and Innovation in Teams.

Affective presence is a novel personality construct that describes the tendency of individuals to make their interaction partners feel similarly positive or negative. We adopt this construct, together with the input-process-output model of teamwork, to understand how team leaders influence team interaction and innovation performance. In 2 multisource studies, based on 350 individuals working in 87 teams of 2 public organizations and 734 individuals working in 69 teams of a private organization, we tested and supported hypotheses that team leader positive affective presence was positively related to team information sharing, whereas team leader negative affective presence was negatively related to the same team process. In turn, team information sharing was positively related to team innovation, mediating the effects of leader affective presence on this team output. The results indicate the value of adopting an interpersonal individual differences approach to understanding how affect-related characteristics of leaders influence interaction processes and complex performance in teams. (PsycINFO Database Record

Negative Core Affect and Employee Silence: How Differences in Activation, Cognitive Rumination, and Problem-Solving Demands Matter

Employees can help to improve organizational performance by sharing ideas, suggestions, or concerns about practices, but sometimes they keep silent because of the experience of negative affect. Drawing and expanding on this stream of research, this article builds a theoretical rationale based on core affect and cognitive appraisal theories to describe how differences in affect activation and boundary conditions associated with cognitive rumination and cognitive problem-solving demands can explain employee silence. Results of a diary study conducted with professionals from diverse organizations indicated that within-person low-activated negative core affect increased employee silence when, as an invariant factor, cognitive rumination was high. Furthermore, within-person high-activated negative core affect decreased employee silence when, as an invariant factor, cognitive problem-solving demand was high. Thus, organizations should manage conditions to reduce experiences of low-activated negative core affect because these feelings increase silence in individuals high in rumination. In turn, effective management of experiences of high-activated negative core affect can reduce silence for individuals working under high problem-solving demand situations.

Measuring affect at work based on the valence and arousal circumplex model.

Affective states have become a central topic of interest in research on organizational behavior. Recently, scholars have been paying more attention to the proposals of the Circumplex Model (Russell, 1980) in order to gain a finer grained understanding of job-related affect. However, the limited availability of well-validated measures to test this model in work settings, particularly in non English-speaking populations, is still a major drawback. Using three samples of English-speaking and Spanish-speaking workers, this article offers the cross-validation of the Multi-Affect Indicator (Warr, 2007) between the original English version and its corresponding translation into Spanish. Multi-group Structural Equation Modeling supported the instruments structure and its invariance between the two languages (English: χ2 = 65.56, df = 48, p = .05; RMSEA = .06; CFI = .97; Spanish: χ2 = 68.68, df = 48, p = .03; RMSEA = .05; CFI = .97). Furthermore, Circular Stochastic Modeling supported the theoretically proposed circumplex representation (χ2 = 139.85, df = 51, p < .01; χ2/df = 2.74, RMSEA = .06). Thus, this study offers an instrument that provides a more accurate approximation to affect at work, both in English and in another of the major language communities in the world, the Spanish-speaking population.

Affect and Creativity

Abstract The question of how the affective experience influences creativity has fascinated and captured the interest of work and organizational psychology and organizational behavior scholars over time. In this chapter, we survey, discuss, and summarize theoretical and empirical research addressing this question, reviewing findings affirming the importance of positive and negative affective states for the generation of novel and useful ideas in the workplace. Furthermore, we apply the Theory of Core Affect to the body of research in this area, which describes the affective experience in terms of affective valence (positive vs negative), but also as a function of activation (energy expenditure). Drawing on this, we argue how a wider array of affective states described by blends of affective valence and activation may influence creative performance, by means of discrete cognitive and behavioral correlates.