Achievement emotions in job selection interviews: Interviewees’ and interviewers’ expectations

This study focused on students’ expectations regarding a wide range of achievement emotions that they imagined could characterize themselves as interviewees and their interviewers in job interviews in which they may participate in the future, with the control-value model as the theoretical framework (Pekrun, 2006). The main aim was to investigate whether intensity of achievement emotions changed according to type of emotion, agent involved (interviewee, interviewer), and students’ age (twelfth graders, university students). The participants were 282 Italian students, including 142 twelfth graders and 140 university students. They completed a written questionnaire focused on expectations about achievement emotions in evaluative settings, career and academic self-efficacy, and job market experience. Younger students evaluated their emotions as more intense compared to older students. The intensity was higher for interviewees’ activating emotions such as enjoyment, pride, hope, anxiety, and shame, and for interviewers’ deactivating emotions such as relief, relaxation, and boredom. In addition, career self-efficacy correlated positively with interviewees’ positive emotions and negatively with interviewees’ anxiety; the number of months of job experience correlated negatively with interviewees’ anxiety and shame, while the number of job interviews correlated negatively with interviewees’ anxiety. Finally, emotion scores about future job interviews correlated positively with emotion scores about current oral tests. Overall, the present data suggest that students possess an optimistic, but also realistic representation of the achievement emotions implied in mechanisms for employee selection, offering some clues from an applied perspective.