The Essential Impact of Stress Appraisals on Job Performance and Work Engagement

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of stressors on in-role performance and work engagement. First, it explores whether stressors traditionally categorized as either challenging or hindering can be appraised simultaneously as both. Second, it explains the contradictory findings surrounding the relationships between stress and performance and engagement by including stress appraisals as a mechanism driving these relationships. In doing so, it also looks at whether stress mindset could explain not only how stressors are appraised, but also how appraisals influence performance and engagement. Over five work days, 487 Canadian and American full-time employees were asked to indicate their stress mindset and appraise an array of challenging and hindering stressors, after which they evaluated their performance and engagement. Results showed that employees rarely appraised stress as uniquely challenging or hindering. In addition, when employees harbored positive views about stress, stressors overall were evaluated as less hindering and hindrance stressors in particular were more challenging. Stress mindset was thus shown to be critical in modulating the genesis of stress appraisals. In turn, appraisals were able to explain the stressors’ relationships to performance and engagement, with challenge and hindrance stressors boosting and hampering these outcomes, respectively. Finally, positive stress mindset buffered the negative influence of hindrance appraisals on engagement. Our findings clarify misconceptions about how workplace stressors are evaluated and offer novel evidence that stress mindset is a key variable in the study of stress at work.