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The purpose of this paper is to develop and investigate the idea that self-profiling and career control by temporary agency workers (TAWs) in low-skill jobs are positively related to informal learning and that this relationship is mediated by job challenge.

An online survey study was conducted among 722 TAWs in low-skill jobs in the Netherlands. Bootstrap mediation analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Self-profiling and career control are positively related to informal learning of TAWs and these relationships are mediated by job challenge.

This is the first study to develop and empirically test the proposition that self-profiling and career control are important factors for enhancing employees’ learning experiences in low-skill jobs.

Hiring companies and temporary work agencies could stimulate and train TAWs’ self-profiling and career control competencies to enhance their job challenge and informal learning. Organizations should consider assigning challenging tasks to TAWs, which may be a good alternative for expensive formal training programs.

Many TAWs in low-skill jobs do not possess the skills and capacities to obtain a better or more secure job. In general, temporary workers face a higher risk of unemployment and greater income volatility (Segal and Sullivan, 1997). Gaining knowledge about how to develop this group is important for society as a whole.

Research on the determinants of informal learning mainly concerned higher-educated employees and managers with long-term contracts (e.g. Dong et al., 2014), whereas very little is known about factors that stimulate informal learning among TAWs in general, and among TAWs in low-skill jobs in particular.

This paper aims to highlight the important role played by supervisory feedback on the job satisfaction experienced by salespeople. In order to address this issue, it seeks to argue that job perceptions (job challenge and job involvement) will mediate the feedback‐satisfaction linkage.

Self‐administered questionnaires were distributed to 250 retail automobile and truck salespersons working at 50 dealerships in a major Southwestern metroplex (five salespeople from each dealership were randomly selected for contact). A cluster sampling procedure was used to identify metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with at least two or more dealerships; dealerships were then randomly chosen from the MSAs. Items used to develop the variables were measured using seven‐point Likert‐type scales. Respondents' level of agreement or disagreement with each statement was assessed.

The findings suggest that supervisors could enhance the already strong link between positive feedback and job satisfaction by associating such feedback with job challenge and job involvement. Such a linkage could serve to enrich the supervisor's feedback, shifting it from the domain of simple “pats on the back” toward supervisor‐initiated development.

Some of the limitations of the paper could be that the nature of the sample makes it difficult to generalize results to salesforces in other industries. The predominance of men in these sales positions, though quite representative of the automobile industry, might obscure any gender‐related issues in feedback research.

The value of the paper is that it looks at the mediating role of job perception that has not been researched enough in the past.

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.

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.

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 emerging natures of big data – volume, velocity, variety, value and veracity – exert higher stress on employees and demand greater creativity from them, causing extreme difficulties in the talent management of organizations in the big data era. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of challenge stressors on creativity and the boundary conditions of the relationship.

Multisource data were collected including 593 followers and their 98 supervisors from organizations that are confronting a big data induced management revolution. Hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrapping analysis were used to test the mediation and moderation mechanism.

The results showed that job burnout mediated the negative relationship between challenge stressors and creativity and that this indirect effect was attenuated by an employee’s core self-evaluation (CSE) and servant leadership. In contrast, whether work engagement mediated the relationship between challenge stressors and creativity was contingent on the level of an employee’s CSE and servant leadership. Specifically, the mediating effect was significant only when an employee’s CSE or servant leadership was high.

The results contribute to our understanding of the relationship between challenge stressor and creativity in the big data era. Specifically, relying on the job demands–resources model, this study empirically opens the “black box” between challenge stressors and creativity by exploring two opposing intermediate mechanisms. In addition, this study reveals boundary conditions by investigating dispositional and contextual factors that can accentuate the positive effect while attenuating the negative effect of challenge stressors on employee creativity.

This study aims to investigate the extent to which interactive performance measurement systems (IPMS), self-profiling and job challenge can improve individual performance.

The authors study the service sector in companies listed on the Indonesian Stock Exchange. From 200 distributed questionnaires, they obtain 89 usable data points, which they analyse using SmartPLS.

The authors find that IPMS improves both self-profiling and job challenge. Both variables significantly boost individual performance.

This study implies that managers can open communication channels to a subordinate to increase individual self-profiling that leads to the improvement of job challenge to generate excellent performance.

This study investigates the importance of self-profiling and job challenge at middle- to lower-level employees in the service sector who receive less attention in the field of management accounting.

The purpose of this paper is to examine: gender differences in the choice to perform challenging tasks, gender differences in the actual performance of challenging tasks, and the impact of challenging experiences on supervisors' evaluations of individuals' potential for career advancement.

In study 1, a sample of 158 students participated in a laboratory study that examined gender differences in choosing to perform challenging tasks in a situation that stressed individual performance. In study 2, a sample of 93 interns completed questionnaires in which the authors measured their challenging job experiences. Interns' supervisors evaluated interns' potential for career advancement.

In an achievement situation, women chose to perform fewer challenging tasks than men (study 1). During their internships, females had fewer challenging job experiences than males (study 2). Having challenging experiences was positively related to supervisors' evaluations of interns' potential for career advancement (study 2).

The use of student samples may be considered a limitation of these studies. However, the nature of the research questions justifies an initial examination among students. Moreover, small gender differences in experiences at the start of individuals' careers may ultimately lead to increasing discrepancies between men's and women's careers.

The study is the first to examine individuals' own impact on the extent to which they experience job challenge. Moreover, it is the first that empirically examines the relationship between job challenge and evaluations of career potential.

This study aims to examine distinct influences of two dimension job stress on job satisfaction and the moderating effects of guanxi-oriented attitude on the relationship between job stress and job satisfaction under cognitive appraisal theory and transactional theory.

In this study, surveys are conducted among state-owned younger bank employees. The author uses the scale of job challenge stress and hindrance stress developed among Chinese younger bank employees to measure the two dimension job stress. After demonstrating guanxi-relative concepts, the moderating effects of guanxi-oriented attitude are examined in this study.

The results demonstrate that guanxi-oriented attitude does not significantly moderate the influence of challenge stress on job satisfaction, while it significantly moderates the noxious influence of hindrance stress on job satisfaction. Theoretical contributions are also discussed.

First, this study suggests specific procedures to conduct hierarchical regression analysis and confirms the effects by parameters. It also proposes and summarizes specific procedures on how to calculate regression equations and draw regression lines to check the interaction received from the hierarchical regression analysis visually. Second, based on cognitive appraisal theory, guanxi-oriented attitude, a Chinese indigenous cognitive concept, was verified in this study. According to the importance of guanxi in Chinese society, the paper shows that employees who value guanxi more will buffer the noxious effects of job stress. Trainings and counseling should be designed to regulate the normal guanxi-oriented-related cognition.