Hindrance demands as a boundary condition to the appraisal of challenge demands

ABSTRACT

Background and objectives:

Studies show that prototypical challenge demands can be appraised as challenging, hindering and threatening. Yet, to date there exists no clear reasoning as to why these different appraisals occur. Drawing on transactional stress theory, we propose that co-occurring hindrance demands likely affect the day-specific appraisal of challenge demands (i.e., time pressure and complexity).

Design and method:

To test this proposition we conducted a daily diary study with 432 employees. We tested our hypotheses using multi-level latent interaction analyses at the within-person level.

Results:

Results revealed that on days when individuals experienced more hindrance demands, they were less likely to appraise time pressure and complexity as challenging and more likely to appraise them as hindering or threatening.

Conclusion:

The results outline the need to consider co-occurring hindrance demands when assessing appraisal patterns associated with challenge demands.

KEYWORDS:

• Challenge-hindrance framework
• cognitive appraisal
• time pressure
• complexity
• daily diary study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Please note that H3 was added during the review process based on a reviewer’s comment. As we only have left out threat appraisal in the originally submitted manuscript due to reasons of brevity and not theoretical reasons, we did not consider this a post-hoc hypothesis.

2 Note that we also exploratively tested our hypotheses including the hindrance demands daily hassles, red tape, role conflict and role ambiguity as separate moderators, each measured by two items of the Rodell and Judge (2009). The results of these additional analyses are reported in the supplemental materials (please see Tables S2–S5). To facilitate interpretation and reduce complexity, in the article itself, we only report the results of analyses where hindrance demands were included as a single construct.

3 Comparative models on the within-, and between-person level and their respective fit indices are reported in the supplemental material, Table S1.

4 Specific results are reported in the supplemental material, Table S6.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Science of the state of Rhineland-Palatine to the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research.