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Drawing from both the transactional theory of stress and the conservation of resources theory, this paper sets out to investigate the role of demand-specific challenge and hindrance appraisal of emotional demands, as well as time pressure and perceived goal progress within the challenge–hindrance framework.

For this research, 91 employees provided daily diary data for one working week. Focusing on within-persons effects, multilevel moderated mediation models using multilevel path analyses were applied.

Both emotional demands and time pressure exert positive effects on work engagement when people expect resource gain (challenge appraisal), independent of actual resource gain (achievement). Furthermore, results show that goal progress buffers negative effects of perceived blocked resource gain (hindrance appraisal) on both emotional and motivational well-being.

This research proposes an extension and refinement of the challenge–hindrance stressor framework to explain health-impairing and motivational processes of emotional demands and time pressure, combining reasoning from both appraisal and resource theory perspectives. The study identifies demand-specific challenge and hindrance appraisals as mediators linking demands to emotional and motivational well-being, emphasizing the influence of goal progress as a resource on these relations.

The aim is to expand the challenge-hindrance framework and develop a coherent theoretical framework that explains individual differences in the way small business owners appraise their job demands. Literature has shown that dealing effectively with job demands leads to competitive advantage and depends on individual appraisals.

For this qualitative study, 20 in-depth interviews were analyzed using a partially grounded theory approach.

Open and axial coding revealed a broader range of demands than have hitherto been studied, related to actions rather than job characteristics. Selective coding confirmed expectations based on the Conservation of Resources Theory that appraisals of demands differ between business owners and change over time depending on role identities, and material, social, personal and energy resource levels, via the valence (identities) and degree of anticipated outcomes. Business owners appraised certain demands as challenging when they were co-occurring with other demands usually categorized as challenges, whereas these same demands were appraised as hindering when co-occurring with demands usually categorized as hindrances.

The results imply that appraisals can be influenced by societal context, life events, processes of formal and informal learning, personal growth and aging. These topics would be interesting avenues for future research.

The results of this study challenge our understanding of job demands in general and current categorizations of job demands as challenges versus hindrances in specific, by providing an in-depth, contextualized and dynamic view of the appraisal of demands related to owning and running a business.

The study aims to explore job demands experienced by employees and managers in micro-enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Drawing on the job demands framework, the study discusses the experienced demands from the perspective of challenges that create opportunities for learning and achievement and hindrances that create obstacles for work. The study builds on the idea that the same demand can be perceived both as a challenge and a hindrance. That approach opens a path to responding to challenges by reformulating working practices and removing hindrances by designing, developing and crafting jobs and tasks.

The authors analyzed open-ended survey responses (N = 306) to study experienced job demands in 50 micro-enterprises and SMEs, how the perceived demands differ between employees and managers and whether they represent challenge or hindrance demands.

The authors identified 17 job demand categories most including both challenge and hindrance demands. Time management and prioritization was the most central challenge and hindrance category for both employees and managers. For employees, sales and stakeholder relationships represented the second largest challenge category and communication and information flow was the second largest hindrance category. For managers, the second largest challenge and hindrance categories were organization and management of activities and the fragmentation of work, respectively.

By focusing on employee experience, the achieve a more nuanced understanding of the SME context, which has been dominated by managerial evaluations. The study also advances the discussion on job demands by extending our knowledge of demands that may be experienced both as a challenge and a hindrance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how job resources may moderate the relationship of two types of job demands (i.e. challenge and hindrance demands) with employee engagement. It is hypothesized that job resources can buffer the association of job hindrances with employee engagement while job resources may escalate engagement in the condition of challenge demands.

The population of the study is Scale-I officers of Indian public sector banks (PSBs). The sample included 608 Junior Management Grade–Scale I officers employed in Indian PSBs.

Results of the analysis revealed a positive relationship between challenge demands and employee engagement whereas the negative relationship between hindrance demands and employee engagement. Enhancement in the positive conditional effect of challenge demands on employee engagement with the increase in values of the job resources evidenced the boosting role of job resources. Further, condition effect of hindrance demand on employee engagement at different levels of moderator showed that the negative relationship between hindrance demands and employee engagement get weakened with the increase in the level of job resources.

The results highlighted the situations that may foster or thwart engagement of employees. Present findings could be guiding in several ways for designing interventions to enhance employee engagement using job demands and job resources.

This study adds to literature through incorporating challenge–hindrance theorization in propositions of job demands-resources model and by exploring two diverse mechanisms (buffering and boost up) which are elicited after interaction of job resources with challenge and hindrance demands in a diverse way.

The argument that work engagement enhances job performance has gained wide acceptance among practitioners and human resources management literature. There is consensus in management literature that job crafting can affect work engagement. The concept of callings from theology has been resurrected in job behavior and continues to garner growing attention from practitioners in recent years. However, few studies examine how and why living a calling influence job crafting and work engagement. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between living a calling, job crafting and work engagement for knowledgeable employees through questionnaires.

The part-time MBA students were asked to reflect on present jobs. In total, 390 effective questionnaires were collected from part-time MBA students of four universities in Chongqing, China for finance, administration, manufacturing, service, technology, medication, education and others. Results were analyzed using SPSS and Amos. The measurement scale is given in Appendix.

First, the author explicitly proposes and validates the direct relationship between living a calling and job crafting. Second, this study confirms that crafting challenging job demands are significant to vigor subdimension and dedication subdimension of work engagement, whereas crafting challenging job demands not significant to absorption subdimension of work engagement. Third, this study indicates that crafting hindering job demands are nonsignificant to vigor, dedication and absorption about three subdimensions of work engagement. Fourth, this study showed living a calling can enhance work engagement for employees. Fifth, this study finds three groups (eight items) of mediation effect between living a calling, job crafting and work engagement.

These insights may help managers to focus on living a calling and encourage beneficial job crafting behaviors in China. The sample is original and has the potential to contribute to debate on work life balance and particularly the meaning of work/careers in China.

This study is an interesting revisit to the old workplace sociology and organizational psychology which has become somewhat neglected these days.

This study has provided insight in the relationships between living a calling, job crafting and work engagement.

The present study develops, conceptualizes and validates a scale based on the transactional stress theory to assess the perceived challenge and hindrance demands of doctoral programs that impact doctoral students’ psychological well-being.

This research employs an exploratory-mixed methodology comprising five phases with a sequential qualitative-quantitative approach. A rigorous scale development process is adopted to validate the instrument’s psychometric properties. The study respondents are Indian full-time doctoral students in the management discipline.

The findings show that the construct of perceived challenge and hindrance demands is a first-order four-factor and a second-order two-factor model. The study has validated the scale to capture the challenge and hindrance demands of doctoral research programs with the following sub-constructs: doctoral program resource inadequacies, doctoral program ambiguity, doctoral program workload and complexity.

The recommended challenge demands and hindrance demands (CHD) scale provides a benchmark for doctoral institutes and program supervisors in focussing on research students’ perception of their doctoral education demands to reduce the strain and increase their well-being during their doctoral program journey.

Hindrance demands adversely influence the motivation resources needed for doctoral education; challenge demands positively impact the research students’ internal resources.

This study investigated a mechanism by which challenge stressors may affect employee well-being outcomes. This study tested a within-person longitudinal model in which the effects of challenge demands relate to basic psychological need satisfaction/thwarting and worker well-being outcomes. In particular, basic psychological need satisfaction and thwarting were hypothesized to mediate challenge demands and outcomes at the intraindividual level.

Data from 84 employees from a weekly survey across four weeks (308 observations) were used in Bayesian multilevel path analyses to test hypotheses.

Although significant indirect effects showed that basic psychological needs mediate between demands and worker outcomes, only a few specific indirect effects (e.g. the path from time pressure via thwarting the need for autonomy to emotional exhaustion) operated as hypothesized. Interestingly, in this study, time pressure was only mediated via thwarting the need for autonomy when considering undesirable worker outcomes (i.e. increased emotional exhaustion, decreased job satisfaction). Job complexity, however, led to decreased emotional exhaustion via the need for competence satisfaction. Implications for need satisfaction and thwarting as mechanisms in the challenge–hindrance framework are discussed.

This study (1) extends the challenge–hindrance framework to include basic psychological needs as a mechanism, (2) expands basic psychological needs to include need thwarting and (3) may enhance our understanding of stressor categories.

This article seeks to apply the challenge–hindrance conceptualization of demands to a model that relates stressors to emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. Supervisory support, a resource, is posited as a precursor to demands, and work–family conflict (WFC) and interpersonal conflict (IPC) at work are expected to mediate the demand–strain and job satisfaction relationships.

This cross‐sectional self‐report survey included a sample of 600 government employees in Canada.

In addition to directly influencing job satisfaction, supervisory support reduces strain and increases motivation by decreasing hindrances and interpersonal conflict. Also, although, challenge and hindrance demands are both positively associated with strain, task complexity is positively associated with job satisfaction, whereas role ambiguity and interpersonal conflict are negatively associated with job satisfaction. Furthermore, work–family conflict and interpersonal conflict fully mediate the effects of supervisory support, role conflict, and task complexity on strain, and they reduce the effects of ambiguity on strain. Thus, these factors have limited effects on strain by themselves; rather, they act on strain through emotional demands.

Some challenges have a strong connection with resources, yet also induce strain. Future models should incorporate the challenge‐hindrance approach to classifying demands and should examine challenge demands that motivate people to engage in stressful activities. Also, although work‐family conflict and interpersonal conflict at work concern different spheres, future research should incorporate both spheres and employ emotional demands as mediating variables.

Given that some challenges can be motivating yet stressful, the consequences of interventions can be difficult to forecast. Results point to the importance of carefully designing interventions and the role of WFC and IPC as potential levers in managing strain arising from complex jobs and other types of challenges.

This paper considers a unique model of demands, resources, and outcome variables that contributes to the knowledge about how to address stress.

This paper is to investigate how employees respond to information security policies (ISPs) when they view the policies as a challenge rather than a hindrance to work. Specifically, the authors examine the roles of challenge security demands (i.e. continuity and mandatory) and psychological resources (i.e. personal and job resources) in influencing employees’ ISP non-compliance.

Applying a hypothetical scenario-based survey method, the authors tested our proposed model in six typical ISPs violation scenarios. In sum, 347 responses were collected from a global company. The data were analyzed using partial least square-based structural equation model.

Findings indicated that continuity and mandatory demands increased employees’ level of perseverance of effort, which, in turn, decreased their ISPs non-compliance intention. In addition, job resources, such as the trust enhancement gained from co-workers and the opportunities for professional development, enhanced the perseverance of effort.

The findings offer implications to practice by suggesting that organizations should design training programs to persuade employees to understand the ISPs in a positive way. Meanwhile, organizations should encourage employees to invest more personal resources by creating a trusting atmosphere and providing them opportunities to learn security knowledge and skills.

This study is among the few to empirically explore how employees respond and behave when they view the security policies as challenge stressors. The paper also provides a novel understanding of how psychological resources contribute to buffering ISP non-compliance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how cognitive and emotional job demands interact with job resources to influence work engagement, and whether work engagement mediates the association of job demands with job satisfaction. In collectivistic patriarchal societies women have fewer resources to devote to work; thus, based on Conservation of Resources theory, the authors have tested if job demands relate differently to work engagement for women than for men and if the mediation differs across genders.

Using data collected from 724 bank officers in India, the authors used the PROCESS macro developed for SPSS to test the hypotheses.

Gender interacted with job demands to influence work engagement, such that the relationship was stronger for men than for women. Moderated mediation analysis showed that men experience work engagement and through work engagement increased job satisfaction from challenging job demands, whereas these benefits do not accrue for women, and when they do, they are significantly less than for men.

Most models and theories of organizational behavior have been developed in the western world where, relatively speaking, men and women enjoy almost equal privileges at work and at home. In collectivistic patriarchal societies, women are responsible for the lion’s share of household chores (Rout et al., 1999) and thus have fewer resources to devote to work, affecting their work engagement and satisfaction. The results behoove researchers to consider gender as a study variable when designing studies on organizational phenomena.