TY - JOUR AB - Purpose Drawing on mood regulation theories, the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of employees’ coworker-helping behaviors (OCB-Is) on the relationships between prior negative affect and subsequent job satisfaction and creative performance. The authors hypothesize that employees’ work competence is a moderator of the relation between negative affect and OCB-Is.Design/methodology/approach Data were collected by the experience sampling method of self-rating (twice per day) and coworker-rating (once per day) over two weeks by 120 administrative employees and their coworkers in a university; 743 available days were obtained.Findings Multilevel modeling showed that self-rated negative affect during the morning was associated with coworker-rated OCB-Is during the afternoon; OCB-Is were positively associated with self-rated job satisfaction and coworker-rated creative performance during the afternoon; based on an indirect effect, OCB-Is mediated the relationships between negative affect and job satisfaction, and negative affect and creative performance; and employees with high-level work competences tended to engage in OCB-Is more than employees with low-level work competences when experiencing negative affect.Originality/value These findings suggest that OCB-Is create a positive reaction by converting negative affect into positive job satisfaction and creative performance and that employees’ work competence is the boundary condition. VL - 48 IS - 6 SN - 0048-3486 DO - 10.1108/PR-01-2018-0038 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-01-2018-0038 AU - Chuang Yating AU - Chiang Hualing AU - Lin Anpan PY - 2019 Y1 - 2019/01/01 TI - Helping behaviors convert negative affect into job satisfaction and creative performance: The moderating role of work competence T2 - Personnel Review PB - Emerald Publishing Limited SP - 1530 EP - 1547 Y2 - 2024/03/29 ER -