Hi Tarun, for several reasons I would suggest multilevel modeling (or latent growth curve analysis in structural equation framework):

for example, you can deal with the problem of independence of observations (and residuals of these observations) and you can handle missing data (I guess that you have missing values in your four wave panel) and so on...

More basically and if I understand you right, you postulate a model of a conditional effect of emotion regulation (measured at one occasion?) on mood and a conditional effect of mood on happiness. Organizational climate could then specified as a higher level predictor (i.e. Level-I, repeated measurements of mood, Level-II individuals, Level-III Organizations (if you have enough different enterprises).

But I can't figure out if you assume that mood is a mediator or a moderator.

Anyway, if you like to test such a model at once you should use a SEM- or multilevel modeling approach. But it depends also on your sample size. Do you use R, MPlus, SAS or SPSS for your analysis? Is it possible for you to provide a little more information about your data collection and your hypothesis? That would be helpful.

Maybe the following books are helpful for you (actually I found them very useful):

Heck, R. H., & Thomas, S. L. (2015). An introduction to multilevel modeling techniques: MLM and SEM approaches using Mplus. Routledge.

Hox, J. J. (2010). Multilevel Analysis: Techniques and Applications (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-84872-845-5.

Verbeke, G.; Mollenberghs, G. (2013). Linear Mixed Models for Longitudinal Data. Springer. Includes SAS code

 Hello Sandra, thank you for your reply. It helped me a lot. Mood is a moderator in my design and I use SPSS. Sample size is 650 so far as I am still collecting data and aim to get data from another 200 participants. Data collection is in the initial phase. Teachers and corporate employees are from 8 different organizations.

I am looking for the differences between teachers and business employees (helping and non-helping professional groups) in how their happiness is effected due to their organizational climates. Also, I want to see which of the two groups has higher impact of organizational climate on happiness, due to influences on mood and emotional regulation. 

Mood is playing a moderating role by increasing the impact of organizational climate on happiness, assessed in a longitudinal fashion. Emotional regulation is a mediator assessed only once, pre-test. This implies that without disrupting emo. regulation, org. climate can not impact mood and happiness.

Please suggest an appropriate statistical test.

Thanks and regards

Tarun

This question and answer are very enlightening. I hope I never have to think like this, but I know I will. Can't always hire someone to take over the quantitative aspect of research, which is just as critical as qualitative exploration.

Gord