Defining emotional levels and climate as context and events

Recent work by Fisher highlighted the importance of making distinctions in levels of measurement of affect. She argued that general measurement of an individual's emotions represents the emotional experience in a person as a single point, or as a summary score of the individual's emotional experience over a period of time. Within-level emotion comparisons, in contrast, are made by assessing the emotional state of an individual at several points in time and then making comparisons between those points, thus, keeping intact the individual's pattern of emotional experience over time. The present argument extends the within/between distinction raised by Fisher at the individual level of analysis to the group or organization level analysis. That is, although affective climate is typically considered as relatively stable or trait-like characteristics of an organization, it can also be thought of as the aggregate measure of people's experiences over time.