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This study aims to use the ego depletion theory to examine the impact of hindrance stressors on knowledge sharing behaviors by investigating the mediating role of ego depletion and the moderating role of self-enhancing humor.

Data were obtained from a two-wave sample of 226 dyads, including employees in the manufacturing industry and their direct supervisors. The hypotheses were tested by hierarchical regression analyzes and Hayes’ PROCESS macro.

The results demonstrated that employees’ self-enhancing humor style could alleviate the impact of hindrance stressors on employees’ ego depletion state and buffer the negative indirect effect of hindrance stressors on employees’ knowledge-sharing behaviors.

Although the authors collected mediator and dependent variables from different sources, this study used a cross-sectional research design, making it difficult to draw causal conclusions. Besides, hindrance stressors, ego depletion and self-enhancing humor style were all reported by employees.

Through the study, the authors highlight the important role of the self-control view in explaining proactive behavior in the workplace and a great awareness of the unforeseeable consequences of ego depletion for employees.

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.

Organizational change is usually stressful and destabilizing for employees, for whom coping with the induced stress is primordial to commit to the change. This paper aims to unravel how and when change recipients can enact different coping strategies and, ultimately, manifest different forms of commitment to change.

We propose a theoretical model that identifies challenge appraisal and hindrance appraisal as two primary appraisals of organizational change that fuel, respectively, proactive and preventive coping strategies and, indirectly, affective and normative forms of commitment to change. Moreover, this framework suggests that coping strategies and commitment are influenced by the secondary appraisal of two vital resources – resilience and POS – allowing individuals to react effectively to primary change-related appraisals. Finally, the relationship between coping strategies and the components of commitment to change is proposed to be moderated by employees' regulatory focus.

Using appraisal theory and conservation of resources theory as guiding frameworks, our integrated model describes the antecedents, processes and boundary conditions associated with coping with the stress of organizational change and how they ultimately influence commitment to it.

This is the first theoretical paper to identify a conditional dual path to disclose the different reactions that change recipients can manifest in response to the stressful aspects of organizational change.

The impact of stress on personal and work-related outcomes has been studied in the information systems (IS) literature across several professions. However, the cybersecurity profession has received little attention despite numerous reports suggesting stress is a leading cause of various adverse professional outcomes. Cybersecurity professionals work in a constantly changing adversarial threat landscape, are focused on enforcement rather than compliance, and are required to adhere to ever-changing industry mandates – a work environment that is stressful and has been likened to a war zone. Hence, this literature review aims to reveal gaps and trends in the current extant general workplace and IS-specific stress literature and illuminate potentially fruitful paths for future research focused on stress among cybersecurity professionals.

Using the systematic literature review process (Okoli and Schabram, 2010), the authors examined the current IS research that studies stress in organizations. A disciplinary corpus was generated from IS journals and conferences encompassing 30 years. The authors analyzed 293 articles from 21 journals and six conferences to retain 77 articles and four conference proceedings for literature review.

The findings reveal four key research opportunities. First, the demands experienced by cybersecurity professionals are distinct from the demands experienced by regular information technology (IT) professionals. Second, it is crucial to identify the appraisal process that cybersecurity professionals follow in assessing security demands. Third, there are many stress responses from cybersecurity professionals, not just negative responses. Fourth, future research should focus on stress-related outcomes such as employee productivity, job satisfaction, job turnover, etc., and not only security compliance among cybersecurity professionals.

This study is the first to provide a systematic synthesis of the IS stress literature to reveal gaps, trends and opportunities for future research focused on stress among cybersecurity professionals. The study presents several novel trends and research opportunities. It contends that the demands experienced by cybersecurity professionals are distinct from those experienced by regular IT professionals and scholars should seek to identify the key characteristics of these demands that influence their appraisal process. Also, there are many stress responses, not just negative responses, deserving increased attention and future research should focus on unexplored stress-related outcomes for cybersecurity professionals.

This paper aims to identify and report the differential effects of activity control and capability control on role stressors, which subsequently affect salespeople’s job satisfaction and sales performance.

Drawing on job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, the authors defined active control and customer demandingness as the job demands and capability control as the job resource, and designed their relationship with role stressors, which are indicated as role ambiguity, role conflict and role overload. The authors enrolled a sample of 223 industrial salespeople from pharmaceutical companies. After collecting the data, the authors used structural equation modeling using AMOS to test and estimate causal relationships along with a two-step approach to examine the interaction effect. The authors have also tested the simple slope of two-way interactions. All of the measured variables were identical to those used in previous studies.

The study findings indicate that behavior-based control can be counterproductive. Reducing activity control can decrease role stress, increase job satisfaction and improve job performance; increasing capability control, however, can reduce role stress and increase job satisfaction and performance. It is also important to acknowledge the external environment of the sales context in which behavior-based control is most effective: whereas high customer demandingness and capability control are related to reduced role stress, high customer demandingness and activity control are related to increased role stress.

Sales managers should recognize that different control management regimes reinforce or mitigate salespeople’s job stressors and outcomes under specific conditions (i.e. work environments marked by higher or lower customer demandingness).

Drawing on JD-R theory, the research shows that a behavior control (i.e. activity control and capability control) has differential, and even opposite, psychological consequences.

In this study, the authors explore teachers' experiences of work during the pandemic using the analytic lens of technostress. More specifically, the authors investigate how the sudden transition to distance education induces technostress among teachers in relation to their teaching practice.

The data gathering method constitutes a questionnaire that explores how teachers' work situation was affected by shifting to distance education. 286 Swedish teachers answered the open-ended questionnaire.

The results demonstrate how technostress creators, technostress strains and teachers' coping strategies are expressed in teaching practice during an extreme case of digitalization.

The authors contribute to the work on technostress by suggesting the theoretical concept of “technorest” to shed light on alternative effects of the digitalization of work practice. Furthermore, the authors give examples of technorest creators which the authors term “techno-shields” and “techno-security”. The results could be interesting to enhance the understanding of the digitalization of work practices and cultivate a more favorable work situation.

This study aims to investigate the role of work–family conflict (WFC) and work engagement (WE) and its influence on role stressors and turnover intention among medical doctors in Malaysian public hospitals. Doctors who experience higher work stress will inevitably experience WFC, consequently triggering their intention to quit.

A total of 202 structured questionnaire responses were collected from medical doctors in four Malaysian public hospitals. The study used partial least squares structural equation modeling (SmartPLS 3.0) for hypotheses testing.

As hypothesized, WFC encourages turnover intention while WE mitigate the relationship between role ambiguity (RA)-TI. RA is also observed to reduce WE, which, in turn, increases the intention to quit. Findings showed that both role conflict and WFC share a positive relationship with TI while WE and TI are negatively related. Furthermore, it was found that WE and WFC are significant mediators in the RA and TI relationship. WFC is also reported to be a significant mediator between the RC and TI relationship.

The causality effects remain limited due to the nature of the cross-sectional design. Future studies should use a longitudinal approach to gauge a better understanding of these relationships.

This study provides insights for policymakers in resolving the increase of turnover issues by providing support and relieving medical doctors’ stress levels. Health directors should be encouraged to focus on the key aspects that may directly affect the well-being of medical doctors and eventually reduced staff turnover.

The study contributes to existing knowledge by measuring variables such as job demand (RS and WFC), personal resources (WE) and job outcomes (TI) in the public health care sector. Additionally, research involving COR theory in Asian countries like Malaysia remains relatively underexplored.

Intensified job demands (IJDs; work intensification, intensified job- and career-related planning and decision-making demands, and intensified learning demands) illustrate the intensification of working life. This study examined relationships between IJDs and work engagement.

Nine diverse samples (n = 7,786) were analyzed separately via regression analysis by estimating linear and curvilinear relationships between IJDs and engagement.

The results showed that certain subdimensions of IJDs, i.e. intensified learning demands, related positively to engagement across several subsamples. Moreover, learning demands showed a curvilinear relationship with engagement in several subsamples; engagement was highest in a moderate level of learning demands whereas low and high levels of learning demands were associated with lower engagement. We also found that other subdimensions of IJDs did not show consistent positive relationships with engagement, and some of them were negatively associated with engagement.

Cross-sectional design.

Organizations should consider what would be the optimal level of learning demands as excessive learning demands can be detrimental to employees’ engagement.

This is a first study focusing on different manifestations of the intensification of working life, operationalized via IJDs, and their curvilinear relationships with engagement by applying a multi-sample design.