HR Management & Compliance

Mood Coming to Work Affects Your Whole Day

If you’ve ever said “I feel rotten this morning, and it’s going to be a rotten day,” two researchers say you’ve probably got it right.

“How are you feeling today?”

No, that’s not just a pleasantry.

According to researchers at the Wharton School of Business and Ohio State University, how you feel … the mood you’re in at the start of each business day … can significantly affect how you perform that day.

Wharton’s Nancy Rothbard and OSU’s Steffanie Wilk studied customer call center reps at a large insurance company. As the reps came in each day, a questionnaire on their computers asked them to score their mood on a 5-point scale, asking if they were excited or enthusiastic, upset or irritable. Then, several times during the day, they were again asked for a score.


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Simultaneously, the researchers were accessing the metrics the company used to gauge the customer service reps’ performance … things like how much time they spent on the phones instead of on breaks, how many calls they took, and how many they transferred to supervisors, which often represented an inability to deal with the situation.

The researchers also listened in on the calls to gauge customers’ moods. Then, when calls were completed, the reps were asked to rate the mood of the customer they’d just spoken with. The aim was to understand which influence was stronger on employee attitude: start-of-day feelings or what happened during the day.

The Spillover Effect is Real … and Powerful

Rothbard and Wilk summarized what they’d learned this way:

“Start-of-day positive mood spills over and affects positive employee mood during the day,” they reported. “Likewise, start-of-day negative mood spills over and affects negative employee mood during the day, even accounting for work-related contextual influences like customer interactions.”


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That spillover effect showed up in the metrics. Reps who started the day happy spent more time on the phone with customers, took fewer breaks, and transferred fewer calls up the line. Those who came to work with negative attitudes handled fewer calls per hour and seemed less engaged in their jobs. They did not, however, transfer more calls.

The researchers noted that the effect of customer moods on the reps was not nearly as significant as influences from events in their lives outside work. For this, the researchers had an explanation: “Start-of-day moods may be more potent because they are caused by events that are more important to workers than interactions with customers,” said the research report.

While the researchers didn’t recommend any work-life initiatives that could improve employee attitudes coming in the door, they did suggest that future research look at these factors.

“The fact that start-of-the-day mood has such a strong and consistent effect is pretty powerful,” said Nancy Rothbard.

The report described above is titled, “Walking in the Door: Sources and Consequences of Employee Mood on Work Performance.” For more information about it, contact Knowledge@Wharton at 215-746-6471.


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