Affective influences on employee satisfaction and performance

Affective influences on employee satisfaction and performance David T. Wagner and Remus Ilies Introduction For much of the 20th century, scientific psychology has been dominated by the behaviorist approach formulated and promoted by influential writers such as J.B. Watson, E.L. Thorndike, and B.F. Skinner. Within the behaviorist tradition, unobservable psychological terms such as those describing emotions, moods and feelings were considered unworthy of scientific scrutiny. In the cognitivist paradigm that extended and then replaced behaviorism, again, feelings and emotions were de-emphasized because they were thought to disrupt rationality. In the organizational domain, scholars have formulated cognitive models aimed at explaining job performance, motivation and attitudes.