Assessing the Role of Appraisals of Challenge and Hindrance Stressors on Job Satisfaction and Turnover Intention

Despite being one of the most prevalent stress models in the organisational psychology and management literature, the challenge-hindrance stress model has come under criticism for inconsistent results. The current study seeks to investigate the role of stressor appraisals as a boundary condition of challenge and hindrance stressors in predicting employee engagement and exhaustion, strengthening the foundation of the model, and offering a potential explanation for previous mixed findings. Building on existing literature, we also probe the mediating role of engagement in the challenge stressors-job satisfaction relationship, Additionally, we explore whether exhaustion serves as a mechanism in the hindrance stressors and turnover intentions link. Using a daily diary design, workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk completed two surveys per day for 10 weekdays (Level-1 N = 1344 observations; Level-2 N = 164 participants). Results indicated that challenge and hindrance appraisals of both challenge and hindrance stressors moderated the effects on engagement and exhaustion. Additionally, while engagement was found to mediate the effects of challenge stressors on job satisfaction, exhaustion did not mediate the relationship between hindrance stressors and turnover intentions. These findings highlight the need for stressor appraisal integration into the challenge-hindrance model and offer insights relating to employee stress management.