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PA scholars argue that two gaps are present in the stress literature: (1) “stress” is too simply treated as deleterious and (2) insufficient efforts are made to capture public servants' stress appraisal, i.e. the degree to which stressors are appraised as hindering or challenging. Overcoming Gap 1, this study aims to study stress as a continuum; from distress to eustress. Overcoming Gap 2, stress appraisal is studied through testing the interaction of PsyCap with the two most common clusters of public servants' job stressors: emotional and psychological stressors.

Hypotheses are tested through structural equation modeling. A sample is used in this study of 1,853 Dutch public servants.

The results show that emotional and psychological stressors are high, but public servants often appraise them as challenging or as “part of the job”, with consequently no increased distress or decreased eustress. Moreover, psychological capital helps public servants to appraise some of the negative effects of emotional, but not psychological, stressors as less deleterious.

By approaching stress as a continuum, the authors bring in a more complete picture of public servants' stress in PA literature. Moreover, this research shows that the ambiguous results in the existing stress literature about the consequences of emotional and psychological stressors on distress/eustress can partially be explained by sector differences as well as personality differences (i.e. PsyCap). Finally, this study criticizes the one-sided attention to PsyCap as purely positive. PsyCap is not only unhelpful in coping with psychological stressors, it also drains the challenging properties of psychological stressors for dedication.

We review the literature on stress in organizational settings and, based on a model of job insecurity and emotional intelligence by Jordan, Ashkanasy and Härtel (2002), present a new model where affective responses associated with stress mediate the impact of workplace stressors on individual and organizational performance outcomes. Consistent with Jordan et al., emotional intelligence is a key moderating variable. In our model, however, the components of emotional intelligence are incorporated into the process of stress appraisal and coping. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of these theoretical developments for understanding emotional and behavioral responses to workplace.

This chapter proposes a more holistic approach to understanding work stress by incorporating eustress, the positive response to stressors. We begin by casting the study of eustress as part of a contemporary movement in both psychology and organizational behavior that accentuates the positive aspects of human adaptation and functioning. We discuss the development of the concept of eustress, and provide extensive evidence, both psychological and physiological, for the purpose of developing an explicit construct definition. An exploratory study of hospital nurses is presented as an initial test of our holistic model of stress. We conclude by asserting that there must exist a complement to coping with distress such that rather than preventing or resolving the negative side of stress, individuals savor the positive side of stress.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how various types of workplace social support from different support sources interact with occupational stressors to predict the psychological well‐being of university professors.

A total of 99 full‐time professors participated via an online or paper questionnaire.

Using moderated hierarchical multiple regressions, the results support the hypotheses that the effects of occupational stressors on professors’ psychological well‐being vary depending on the level of perceived workplace social support. However, although workplace social support buffered the effects of some occupational stressors (i.e. work overload), social support exacerbated the adverse effects of others (i.e. decision‐making ambiguity).

The dichotomous effects of social support suggest that the impact of social support may be moderated by another variable, such as perceived control over the stressor at hand. The present findings echo calls for further refinements to models of social support to examine how individuals’ situational appraisals shape the variable interactive effects of stressors and social support on individuals’ health and well‐being.

This study provides new insight into academic work stress by systematically examining the effects of workplace social support on professors’ work stress experience. This study also extends our current understanding of the relationships among stressors, strains, and social support by providing empirical evidence that workplace social support is neither consistently beneficial nor a unidimensional construct.

This study aimed to explore the relationship between job insecurity and unsafe behaviour in human–machine collaboration, as well as investigating the mediating roles of emotional exhaustion and moderating roles of psychological detachment.

The authors followed the stressor-detachment model to build our research model. The authors selected manufacturing and service industry employees as samples, and designed three independent studies using the time-lagged method for SPSS and AMOS to test the hypotheses.

The results indicated that emotional exhaustion mediated the relationship between the two types of job insecurity and unsafe behaviours among service industry employees, while psychological detachment moderated the effect of qualitative job insecurity on emotional exhaustion. In manufacturing, psychological detachment moderated the effect of quantitative job insecurity on emotional exhaustion, while emotional exhaustion mediated the relationship between quantitative job insecurity and unsafe behaviours.

The authors enhance understandings of how individual employee characteristics and the work environment jointly influence employees' levels of emotional exhaustion and likelihood of engaging in unsafe behaviours under the stressor-detachment model.

The authors suggest an important role of psychological detachment in human–machine collaboration. The authors also that organisations and managers could encourage employees not to check work-related emails on weekends to achieve full detachment.

This study contributes to both the stressor-detachment model and job insecurity literature. In addition, it investigates the role of detachment and emotional exhaustion by employees in human–machine collaboration.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of emotional intelligence (EI) as a buffer to job stressors on employee adjustment.

Based on the job demands resources model, this study examined 306 nurses in the healthcare sector to test a model of job stressors, EI, and their interactions nursing adjustment outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction and psychological health). The hypothesized model predicted that higher trait EI would act as a buffer to the potential negative effects of stressors on employee adjustment. Two-way moderated hierarchical multiple regression analyses was used to test the model in addition to interaction effects.

The results of this study revealed mixed results in terms of the expected main effects of EI and the five significant moderating effects. While some interactions support a buffering hypothesis; contrary to expectations, a buffering effect was also found for those with low EI.

The findings enable a better understanding how EI moderates the effects of stressors on important work outcomes in healthcare. Additionally, the implications from this study allows healthcare administrators and managers to improve staffing and work outcomes through identifying and selecting staff who are characterized by higher trait EI or alternatively, train staff in self-awareness and dealing with emotional behaviors.

HR managers could focus on selecting staff, who possessed higher trait EI for roles where overload and ambiguity are endemic to the job performed. Training could also be used to enhance EI among managers to focus on self-awareness and dealing with emotional behaviors.

This study makes several contributions to understanding how EI moderates the relationships between work stressors and workplace adjustment and wellbeing.

This chapter builds on previous research that conceptualized organizational politics as an organizational stressor. After reviewing the studies that integrated the occupational stress literature with the organizational politics literature, it discusses the negative implications of the use of intimidation and pressure by supervisors, implications that have generally been overlooked. Specifically, the chapter presents a conceptual model positing that the use of intimidation and pressure by supervisors creates stress in their subordinates. This stress, in turn, affects subordinates’ well-being, evident in higher levels of job dissatisfaction, job burnout, and turnover intentions. The stress also reduces the effectiveness of the organization, reflected in a high absenteeism rate, poorer task performance, and a decline in organizational citizenship behavior. The model also maintains that individual differences in emotional intelligence and political skill mitigate the stress experienced by subordinates, resulting from the use of intimidation and pressure by their supervisors. In acknowledging the destructive implications of such behavior in terms of employees’ well-being and the productivity of the organization, the chapter raises doubts about the wisdom of using it, and advises supervisors to rethink its use as a motivational tool. Implications of this chapter, as well as future research directions, are discussed.

Researchers in the field of occupational stress and well-being are increasingly interested in the role of emotion regulation in the work context. Emotion regulation has also been widely investigated in the area of lifespan developmental psychology, with findings indicating that the ability to modify one’s emotions represents a domain in which age-related growth is possible. In this chapter, we integrate the literatures on aging, emotion regulation, and occupational stress and well-being. To this end, we review key theories and empirical findings in each of these areas, summarize existing research on age, emotion regulation, and stress and well-being at work, and develop a conceptual model on how aging affects emotion regulation and the stress process in work settings to guide future research. According to the model, age will affect (1) what kinds of affective work events are encountered and how often, (2) the appraisal of and initial emotional response to affective work events (emotion generation), and (3) the management of emotions and coping with affective work events (emotion regulation). The model has implications for researchers and practitioners who want to understand and facilitate successful emotion regulation and stress reduction in the workplace among different age groups.

Drawing upon the career construction theory (Savickas, 2002, 2013) and the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989, 2001), the purpose of this paper is to explore whether, how and when career adaptability influences citizenship outcomes (i.e. citizenship behavior and citizenship fatigue).

Two-wave data were collected from 306 employees working in the operation department of an e-commerce company in Eastern China.

The results showed that both affective commitment and emotional exhaustion mediated the relationship between career adaptability and both citizenship behavior and citizenship fatigue, revealing a dual-process mechanism. Moreover, both the positive association between career adaptability and affective commitment and the negative association between career adaptability and emotional exhaustion were stronger among employees with a high (vs low) level of hindrance stressors.

This study sheds light on the mechanisms and boundary conditions of the career adaptabilities–citizenship outcomes relationship.

This is one of the first studies to investigate the mechanism of the relationship between career adaptability and citizenship outcomes using multi-wave data.