Daily Workplace Anger and Same‐Day Employee Attitudes: The Moderating Role of Interpersonal Anger Coping

ABSTRACT

Workplace anger is a common and consequential affective experience. Although anger is negatively valenced, it is also associated with approach motivation, perceived agency, and readiness to act. Drawing on affective events theory and appraisal perspectives on emotion, this study examines how daily workplace anger relates to two same‐day employee attitudes: helplessness and self‐assurance. We further examine whether interpersonal anger coping, in the form of approach‐ and avoidance‐oriented behavior, moderates these relationships. Using experience‐sampling data from 220 full‐time employees across 2,059 daily observations, we found that daily workplace anger was positively related to helplessness and negatively related to self‐assurance. In analyses of observations for which coping was assessed, approach‐oriented anger coping moderated the anger–self‐assurance relationship: anger was negatively related to self‐assurance when approach behavior was low, whereas this relationship was weaker when approach behavior was high. Approach behavior did not moderate the anger–helplessness relationship, and avoidance behavior did not moderate either relationship. These findings show that daily workplace anger is associated with same‐day attitudinal strain, while also identifying approach‐oriented coping as a boundary condition for the relationship between anger and self‐assurance.