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Although the appraisal of a situation as challenging has positive effects on performance and stress-related outcomes, the situational and individual characteristics that make challenge appraisal likely are far from clear. The purpose of this paper is to test these characteristics based on a review of the conceptualizations of challenge and the associated positive effects.

Potential characteristics of challenge are tested in two policy-capturing studies using a full factorial experimental design.

Results reveal that situations are appraised as more challenging than threatening when goal importance, task difficulty and controllability are high rather than low.

These results indicate that challenge and threat are distinguished through the means a person believes to have available to cope with demands, an aspect of controllability.

This paper provides a first experimental test of characteristics of challenging situations.

The purspose of this study is to examine the interplay between job resources (job control and support for creativity from coworkers and supervisors), age and creativity at work. Job control and support for creativity are assumed to benefit idea creativity and to moderate the relationship between age and idea creativity.

A sample of 117 nurses completed questionnaire measures and reported a creative idea they recently had at work. Three subject matter experts rated the creativity of the ideas. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test hypotheses.

Job control and support for creativity as well as age were unrelated to idea creativity. However, job control and support for creativity moderated the relationship between age and idea creativity. Age was positively related to idea creativity under high job control and negatively related to idea creativity under low job control and low support for creativity.

A potentially selective sample due to systematic drop‐outs and a selection effect of older nurses might limit the generalizability of our results. Future research should examine the mechanisms that explain the moderating effect of job resources in the relationship between age and performance.

Older employees' creativity at work can be raised by fostering support for creativity from coworkers and supervisors. Younger employees should get support to deal with a high level of job control, because their creativity is lowest under a high level of job control.

Using data from multiple sources the study shows that different constellations of job resources benefit older and younger employees' creativity at work.

Work design has largely overlooked cognitive–emotional interactions in understanding employee motivation and satisfaction. My aim in this chapter is to develop a conceptual model that integrates what we know about these interactions from research on emotions and neuroscience with traditional and emergent work design perspectives. I propose that striving for universal goals influences how a person responds to the work characteristics, such that an event that is personally relevant or “self-referential” will elicit an emotional reaction that must be regulated for optimal performance, job satisfaction, and well-being. A Self-Referential Emotion Regulatory Model (SERM) of work design is presented.