Transformational Leadership and Employees’ Thriving at Work: The Mediating Roles of Challenge-Hindrance Stressors

Abstract

Based on previous research, the conceptual model presenting the interaction between transformational leadership, challenge-hindrance stressors and thriving at work was constructed and used to generate the hypotheses for the study. Data were obtained from 542 questionnaires distributed across different organizations. The participants included ordinary employees, grassroots middle and senior managers from China. The major findings are as follows. First, transformational leadership directly is positively related to challenge stressors and thriving at work. Second, challenge stressors are positively relate to thriving at work, while hindrance stressors are negatively relate to thriving at work. Furthermore, challenge stressors mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and thriving at work. Given these findings, the study examined the moderating effect of supervisor developmental feedback on the relationship between transformational leadership and thriving at work. Results reveal that supervisor developmental feedback plays a positive regulatory role between challenge stressors and thriving at work. Additionally, it is shown that the mediating effect of challenge stressors on the relationship between transformational leadership and thriving at work is moderated by supervisor developmental feedback.

The Impact of Challenge and Hindrance Stressors on Thriving at Work Double Mediation Based on Affect and Motivation

“…The above views are consistent with the findings of Lin et al (2020) , showing that different types of stressors play different mediating roles between transformational leadership and employees’ thriving at work. We therefore suggest the following hypothesis:…”

“…Control variables. In order to determine the potential impact of other explanations on the empirical results, after a thorough review of the empirical studies on thriving at work, we chose age, gender and education level as control variables, which were also adopted by many scholars with thriving or stressors research ( Li et al, 2019 ; Abid et al, 2020 ; Lin et al, 2020 ). Firstly, age is crucial to thriving, since elder people are more likely to be tired at work and unwilling to learn new knowledge ( Kanfer and Ackerman, 2004 ).…”

“…It has become one of the most researched conceptions in positive psychology ( Porath et al, 2012 ), because increasing organizations expect employees not only to maintain positive affect in the workplace but also to learn and grow autonomously ( Cameron et al, 2003 ). Although it has long been established ( Flinchbaugh et al, 2015 ; Lin et al, 2020 ) that the stressors in the workplace, which are situational factors and have significant influences on the employees ( Bliese et al, 2017 ), will impact thriving at work, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, and the corresponding research is still in the early stages of theory development.…”

Can Corporate Social Responsibility Promote Employees’ Taking Charge? The Mediating Role of Thriving at Work and the Moderating Role of Task Significance

“…A sample item includes “At work, I find myself learning often.” Response options ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Furthermore, according to previous empirical studies on thriving at work, although it has two dimensions, scholars usually calculate the average score for subsequent analysis ( Hildenbrand et al, 2018 ; Lin et al, 2020 ). The scale’s Cronbach’s α value was 0.847 in this study.…”

When and Why Leaders’ Helping Behavior Promotes Employees’ Thriving: Exploring the Role of Voice Behavior and Perceived Leader’s Role Overload

“…The second aspect attempts to construct the impact of leaders' behavior and characteristics on employees' thriving at work (e.g., Li et al, 2016;Niessen et al, 2017;Walumbwa et al, 2018). For example, it has been shown that authentic leadership (Xu et al, 2017), empowering leadership (Li et al, 2016), service leadership (Jo et al, 2020), and transformational leadership (Lin et al, 2020) are all positively related to employees' thriving. The third part of the research explores the effect of job and organizational factors (e.g., Prem et al, 2017;Jiang et al, 2020;Strecker et al, 2020).…”