When affect is not episodic: Extending Affective Events Theory under sustained oversight

Abstract Affective Events Theory explains how workplace emotions arise from discrete events and shape attitudes and behaviour. Drawing on a phenomenological study of 29 employees and 13 managers working within oversight saturated supervisory contexts in the post–Royal Commission Australian financial services sector, this paper extends Affective Events Theory by examining how affective experience unfolds when accountability is continuous, and discretion is constrained. Across dual-cohort findings, affect was not primarily anchored to identifiable events that resolved over time. Instead, participants described emotion as persistent and cumulative, produced through ambiguity and emotional restraint, and circulating across supervisory roles. Employees reported sustained interpretive effort directed towards reading tone, silence, and procedural communication, while managers described regulating emotional expression to remain defensible under accountability pressures. These findings specify boundary conditions for the episodic logic of Affective Events Theory, by explaining how affect may be conceived as a sustained condition in contexts with sustained oversight, with meaningful implications for workplace attitudes and behaviours and for managerial practice in highly regulated organisational environments where accountability and supervision are continuous.