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.