Energized or distressed by time pressure? The role of time pressure illegitimacy

ABSTRACT

According to Stress-as-Offense-to-Self theory, illegitimate stressors should undermine the self-enhancing potential and amplify the strain-related consequences of challenge stressors. We therefore postulated that time pressure will be less challenging and more hindering/threatening when considered illegitimate. In a five-day daily and a consecutive three-week weekly diary study (N = 117), we examined within-level indirect effects of daily/weekly time pressure on strain and performance-related outcomes via challenge/hindrance/threat appraisal and tested the role of illegitimacy in these relationships. Time pressure predicted both strain (emotional irritation/exhaustion) and performance-related variables (professional efficacy/engagement). Indirect effects were only found for emotional irritation and engagement via challenge appraisal; these effects were moderated by illegitimacy in the daily data. Underscoring the importance of illegitimacy, the consideration of illegitimacy rendered many associations of hindrance and threat appraisals with outcomes insignificant. Overall, illegitimacy mostly predicted outcomes directly or moderated relationships between time pressure and challenge, hindrance, and threat appraisal. Also supporting our reasoning, illegitimacy augmented the effect of “urgency” (i.e., time pressure net of challenge, hindrance, and threat appraisal) on strain. By contrast, illegitimacy undermined effects of urgency on engagement only at low, rather than high, urgency, which we interpret as indicating a performance protection mode.

KEYWORDS:

• Stress as offense to self
• stressor illegitimacy
• time pressure
• challenge and hindrance stressors
• performance protection

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Isabel Arnold, Berit Cornelius, and Anna Kahlmann for their valuable support in data collection. Preliminary results of this study have been presented at the 36th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, New Orleans, LA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1. Originally, we postulated only direct associations between time pressure and strain/performance-related variables and the moderation of these associations by illegitimacy appraisal, while challenge, hindrance, and threat appraisal were considered as control variables. However, from the beginning, the rationale for the hypotheses relied on the idea that illegitimacy undermines the challenging and amplifies the hindering/threatening potential of time pressure, and we referred to authors that “have increasingly called for a consideration of cognitive appraisals (i.e., challenge, hindrance, and threat appraisals)” already in the first version of the manuscript. During the revision process, reviewers challenged our way of referring to these appraisals somewhat implicitly and suggested to formulate our thinking in a more straightforward way. We therefore now explicitly refer to indirect effects via challenge/hindrance/threat appraisals (Hypotheses 3–5) and, later in this article, to the moderating role of illegitimacy related to these appraisals (Hypotheses 6 and 7). Thus, these hypotheses were not a priori in the strict sense. However, they are by no means post hoc hypotheses but rather explicit formulations of the rationale that was an important foundation of our study to begin with.