How Leaders Change the Way Employees Experience Stress
What I learned from surveying 255 employees over five weeks (and what it means for anyone who manages people).
Imagine two employees get handed the same tight deadline. One feels a spark: this is my chance to show what I can do! But the other feels dread: this is going to bury me.
It’s the same deadline, the same workload, but a completely different experience of stress. What’s happening here is a cognitive process called stress appraisals, in which employees (and you or me at various other points in our lives) are determining if the task in front of them is a challenge they can rise to or a hindrance that will get in their way.
For my Master of Science thesis at the Telfer School of Management (University of Ottawa), I wanted to know what explains that difference and specifically, whether the answer might be sitting in the corner office. Does the way someone is led change the way they experience stress?
The short answer: yes. The surprise is in the how.
This page is a plain-language summary of my thesis, which is published in full by the University of Ottawa. This research won the Human Resources Research Institute award for Best Master’s Thesis and was presented at the Academy of Management Annual Conference.
Why "how you see it" matters more than "what it is"
In 2000, Cavanaugh and colleagues studied nearly 1,900 managers and discovered that stress from meaningful demands boosts job satisfaction, while stress from obstacles drives people out the door. What emerged from this research was an incredibly useful classification for job demands: challenge stressors and hindrance stressors.
Challenge stressors are the demands that tend to push us to grow, typically things like learning a new skill or a tight-but-doable deadline. Hindrance stressors, on the other hand, are things that just get in the way like red tape, unclear role expectations, or constant interruptions.
There’s a catch, though: not everyone reacts to the same demand in the very same way.
While the challenge vs. hindrance classification is a useful starting point, decades of stress science tells us that what actually determines your stress response isn't the demand itself. It's your appraisal: your split-second judgment of whether this demand is an opportunity you can handle or a threat that will overwhelm you.
Imagine you get asked to take on a new project at work; are you excited by the challenge or instantly overwhelmed because your plate was already full and this new thing will stop you from meeting existing deadlines? That’s appraisal. Same project, different reaction.
Appraisals feel automatic, but they can be influenced. One very powerful source of influence is leadership. A 2014 study found that charismatic leaders help employees appraise demands more positively. My research question was how are leaders influencing appraisal? What states are leaders cultivating in employees that actually change how demands are interpreted?
How I studied it
I recruited 255 employed adults across many industries (education, tech, healthcare, professional services, and more) and surveyed them four times over roughly five weeks.
First, participants rated their direct supervisor's leadership style. I focused on transformational leadership, a well-studied style where leaders inspire people with a clear vision, treat them as individuals, encourage them to see difficulties as problems to be solved, and support their development.
Later, participants reported the actual stressors they'd faced in the previous five workdays and how they appraised them: as challenges (opportunities to grow) or hindrances (threats to their progress).
Along the way, I measured three psychological states that might explain any leadership effects on appraisals: psychological safety, psychological empowerment, and stress mindset.
What I found
1. Employees with transformational leaders experience the same stressors differently.
People who rated their supervisor higher on transformational leadership saw workplace demands as more of an opportunity and less of a threat. This held even for hindrance stressors, the "bad" kind.
Leaders don’t make the red tape disappear, but the red tape feels less intrusive.
2. Psychological empowerment is more important than psychological safety (for appraisals)
I tested three possible explanations for how leaders are helping employees appraise stressors more as challenges and less as hindrances:
Psychological empowerment: feeling capable, in control, and that your work is meaningful and matters
Psychological safety: feeling you can ask questions and make mistakes without punishment or embarrassment
Stress mindset: your general belief about whether stress is harmful or can be enhancing
Only psychological empowerment consistently explained the link. The employees of transformational leaders felt more capable and in control in relation to their work, and that is what shifted their appraisals toward opportunity and away from threat.
This surprised me, because psychological safety is one of the most talked-about ideas in management. Transformational leaders did create more of it, so the employees of transformational leaders did feel safer at work, but in my data feeling safe with your team didn’t change how you interpreted the demands of your job.
My interpretation: appraisals are a deeply internal, individual process. How you see yourself in relation to your work moves the needle more than how you see your team. Psychological safety likely earns its keep elsewhere, but not here.
3. Stress mindset did not relate to how people interpret stressors
Even more surprising was the finding that having a positive stress mindset did not impact appraisals. While seeing stress as potentially beneficial may have other positive effects for employees, it did not seem to impact how employees responded to common workplace stressors in my research.
One possible explanation is that employees' view of stressors does not affect their views of whether they were, themselves, motivated or prepared to meet a given stressor's demands.
The belief that stress is beneficial is great, but it seems like what matters more for appraisals is the capability and control you have to handle the demands.
What this means if you lead people
You can't remove every stressor from your team's plate. But my research suggests you have influence over how those stressors land.
In practice, that looks like: connecting each person's work to something meaningful to them; giving real control over how work gets done, not just what gets done; expressing specific confidence in people's abilities; and treating difficulties as problems to be solved rather than fires to be feared.
One important caveat: challenge stress isn't free. A 2004 study by Boswell and colleagues found that both challenge and hindrance stress relate to psychological strain, and separate research by LePine and colleagues, also in 2004, found that both types of stress increase exhaustion. Challenge drives people to learn and grow., but the upsides are motivational. It's more energizing to work on a challenge than a hindrance, but in both cases, rest and recovery matter.
The complete thesis is published by the University of Ottawa as Nina Nesdoly’s Master’s Thesis and a paper based on this thesis was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in 2021.
How to cite:
Nesdoly, N. & O’Reilly, J. (2021) The impact of transformational leadership on employees' appraisals of stressors. Paper presented at the 81st Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, virtual conference, August 1.
STUDY AT A GLANCE
Researcher: Nina Nesdoly, Master’s Thesis, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa (supervised by Dr. Jane O'Reilly)
Who: 255 employed adults with a direct supervisor, across education, healthcare, tech, professional services, and more
How: Four surveys spaced over ~5 weeks
When: data collected in 2020 via the Prolific research platform
Key result: Transformational leadership predicted seeing stressors as more of an opportunity and less of a threat; psychological empowerment was the consistent explaining mechanism