With a team of international collaborators, associate professor John Vongas recently published a paper on the relationship between job stressors and work engagement in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE (2022 Impact Factor: 3.7).
Why is this important? The occupational stress literature had neglected to look at 1) the extent to which employees appraise job stressors as challenging or hindering (or stress appraisals) and 2) the extent to which they believe that stress is beneficial or debilitating (or stress mindset). Therefore, this paper looks at what happens to an employee’s work engagement during periods of stress when considering the joint effects of these two variables. Below are the paper’s abstract and web access.
Abstract
This paper explains the contradictory findings on the relationship between stress and work engagement by including appraisals as a driving mechanism through which job stressors influence engagement. In doing so, it explores whether stressors categorized as either challenging or hindering can be appraised simultaneously as both. Second, it investigates whether stress mindset explains not only how stressors are appraised, but also how appraisals influence engagement. Over five workdays, 487 Canadian and American full-time employees indicated their stress mindset and appraised numerous challenging and hindering stressors, after which they self-reported their engagement at work. Results showed that employees rarely appraised stress as uniquely challenging or hindering. Moreover, when employees harbored positive views about stress, stressors overall were evaluated as less hindering and hindrance stressors were particularly more challenging. Stress mindset appears to be critical in modulating the genesis of stress appraisals. In turn, appraisals explained the stressor-engagement relationship, with challenge and hindrance stressors boosting and hampering engagement, respectively. Finally, positive stress mindset buffered the negative effect of hindrance appraisals on engagement. Our findings clarify misconceptions about how workplace stressors impact engagement and offer novel evidence that stress mindset is a key factor in stress at work.
To access the full paper, please follow this link.