Vigor’s Construct Validity 1 Feeling Vigorous at Work? The Construct of Vigor and the Study of Positive Affect in Organizations

While often used in everyday exchanges, feeling vigorous at work, that is individuals’ feelings that they have physical strength, emotional energy, and cognitive liveliness, has hardly been subjected to any conceptual inquiry or empirical research. In this chapter, I pursue the following objectives: (a) to review the range of behavioral science literature in which vigor has been considered as a distinct affect; (b) based on this review, to present a conceptual framework of vigor at work; (c) to explore the antecedents of vigor and its consequences, including vigor’s possible effects on individuals’ mental and physical health, and job performance; and (d) to describe a proposed measure of vigor at work and the results of an effort to construct validate the new measure. I conclude by pointing out a few open research questions that concern the study of vigor at work Vigor’s Construct Validity 3 Feeling Vigorous at Work? The Construct of Vigor and the Study of Positive Affect in Organizations A striking introductory observation that one can make on feeling vigorous at work is that the term is ubiquitous in common language. Vigor, in its various forms, has long been the topic of literary accounts, artistic descriptions, and philosophical inquiries. The expressions “I feel energetic” or “I feel vigorous” appear widely in both lay psychology and narrative accounts of life in organizations. To illustrate, in research on leadership behavior, feeling vigorous is often associated with managerial effectiveness (e.g., Church & Waclawsk, 1998). As a prime example of a positive emotion, however, vigor has rarely been the topic of conceptual and integrative analysis. This stands in sharp contrast to the exponential growth in research on vigor’s negative counterpart, burnout at work. The popularity of burnout as a major topic of research appears to continue unabated (cf. Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1998, pp. 70-72). Burnout is often viewed as an affective reaction to ongoing stress whose core content is the gradual depletion over time of individuals’ intrinsic energetic resources, comprising of emotional exhaustion, physical fatigue, and cognitive weariness (Shirom, 1989, 2003). In this chapter, I focus on the opposite of burnout, namely on individuals’ feelings that they possess physical strength, emotional energy and cognitive liveliness, a set of interconnected affective experiences dubbed as vigor. Vigor is viewed as a core affect (Russell, 2003) attributed to one’s work milieu. That is, I present and elaborate the conceptual domain of vigor as an affective response in the context of work organizations. This is done by my pursuing the following objectives: (a) to review the range of behavioral science literature in which vigor has been considered as an affect; (b) based on this review, to present a conceptual framework of vigor at work; (c) to explore some of the organizational antecedents of vigor and its possible impact on individuals’ mental and physical health, and Vigor’s Construct Validity 4 job performance, and (d) to describe a proposed measure of vigor at work and present results of a study that provides support for the new measure’s construct validity. Finally, I point out some of the open questions to be addressed in future research on vigor. Following Gray and Watson (2001), I define an emotion as a highly structured response to a specific type of events or environmental interactions that gives rise to a characteristic adaptive behavior, adaptive behavior that is relevant to the needs, goals, or survival of the organism. This definition includes the so-called basic emotions (e.g., fear, joy, love) and social emotions (e.g., guilt, jealousy). Gray and Watson (2001) used the dimensions of duration, focus on the situation, intensity, frequency, and function to differentiate between emotion and mood. They (Gray & Watson, 2001) viewed emotions as referring to short term, focused, intense, infrequent, and adaptive responses, while moods refer to long term and pervasive, unfocused, less intense, and continuous responses, and proposed the term affect to denote both emotions and moods. According to the cognitive theory of emotions developed by Lazarus and Folkman (1984, pp. 273-4, 284-5) cognitions and emotions are theoretically separable even though they tend to appear conjoined in nature, mutually affecting each other over time. Most theories regard emotions as indicating fundamental action tendencies whose purpose is to motivate behavior related to the survival of the species (e.g., Watson, 2002). The primary functions, or adaptive value, of emotional experiences are expressed in such activities as preparing for action, withdrawing from danger, and communicating with other members of the species. In this chapter, I refer to vigor as an affect; however, the basic features of this affect, as discussed in the definitional framework developed latter, may lead future researchers to regard it as an emotion. Vigor, like other basic emotions, represents an innate pattern of responses to environmental cues that has evolved because of its general functional significance. Vigor’s Construct Validity 5 PAST APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF VIGOR