CAUSES FOR DIFFERENCES IN EMPLOYEE ADAPTIVE PERFORMANCE: EXPLORING THE STRESS EFFECTS TRIGGERED BY INTERPRETATIONS OF NON-COMPLIANT TASKS
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Abstract
Employees’ understanding of assigned tasks determines their organizational behavior and performance. This study observes that employees’ perceptions of stress may come from their interpretation of illegitimate tasks. Furthermore, proactive self-control, among personal characteristics, may influence this process. This study explored how employees’ perceptions of illegitimate tasks affect their adaptive performance. This study collected valid samples of 699 medical staff for empirical analysis. The three main results show that challenge stress can improve employees’ self-relieving skills (Handling Work Stress) and training participation (Training Effort), while hindrance stress is just the opposite. Secondly, unreasonable, and unnecessary tasks will make employees feel more hindrance pressure than challenge pressure. Finally, initiation self-control can help employees interpret job stress from illegitimate tasks. Therefore, this study suggests that managers can try to help employees understand illegitimate tasks in a positive way or train employees to improve initiation self-control, which can effectively help employees better cope with challenges at work.
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