It’s About Time: The Promise of Continuous Rating Assessments for the Organizational Sciences

Organizational scholars have grown increasingly aware of the importance of capturing phenomenon at the within-person level of analysis in order to test many organizational behavior theories involving emotions, motivation, performance, and interpersonal processes, to name a few. Experience sampling methodology (ESM) and diary-based procedures provide data that better match many dynamic organizational theories by measuring constructs repeatedly across events or days, providing an inter-episodic understanding of phenomena. In this article, we argue for the value of another measurement procedure that also adopts a repeated measures approach but does so by continuously measuring psychological processes without any gaps over relatively short timeframes. More specifically, we suggest that continuous rating assessments (CRA) can serve as a tool that enables the measurement of dynamic intra-episodic processes that unfold over the course of events, enabling precise determination of how, when, and in what way constructs change and influence each other over time. We provide an overview of this methodology, discuss its applicability to understanding time-based phenomena, and illustrate how this technique can provide new insight into dynamic processes using an empirical example.