Write a research proposal on Thriving at Work under Challenge Stressor?

Introduction

In modern industries, the sheer level of competition has reached an all-time peak as trends like globalization and remote-working enables employers to hire talent without border restrictions. In such global business environment, employees need to learn to thrive under a constant pressure of work and success against all odds (Mackey, Perrewe & McAllister 2017). Learning to perform well in competitive scenarios and challenging market conditions is a common expectation from employees now. Most employers develop a competitive organisational culture where employees are constantly monitored and subjected to performance review, making employees live in a constant presence of challenge stressors like time pressure and learning demands (Prem et al. 2017). 

This study aims to identify a potential issue in long-term sustainability of such an approach by organisations. An optimal research design is formulated at this stage with the goal of identifying intricacies of workplace challenge stressors in a long-term. 

Research background

In the contemporary corporate professional lifestyle, employees are consistently required to perform better than ever before and incentives are designed in a way that pushes employees to achieve targets that have not been achieved before. The highly competitive organisational culture of modern companies results in many stressors being present in the organisations that often provide motivation to the employees to excel at their work (Gangadharan & Welbourne 2017). However, constant exposure to such a workplace environment pushes the employees to their absolute limits and makes it very difficult for them to retain a healthy social life as they get burned out both mentally and physically. This study has primarily focused on two challenge stressor – time pressure and learning demands (Min, Kim & Lee 2015). An extensive literature review has been performed in previous assessments in this research project revealing that the challenge stressors do indeed help employees thrive in a cut-throat competitive environment of a business. 

Existing research points out an inconsistency that is present in this approach of business organisations and employees as well. Even though the challenge stressors help employees remain competitive and thrive in the company in short-terms; in the long-terms, such practices significantly reduce their capabilities, performance, well-being, and efficiency at work (Prem et al. 2017). In this manner, the inconsistency in this method of challenge stressor suggests unsustainable nature of challenge stressor getting deployed as a permanent fixture. It is undoubtedly a requirement in modern workplaces for employees to thrive in competitive scenarios and working under pressure is becoming an industry-level paradigm (Gangadharan & Welbourne 2017). This research attempts to find long-term impacts of challenge stressor of time pressure and learning demands and tries to find presence of a health balance between pressure and sustainable employee wellbeing.

(Some parts of the solution has been blurred due to privacy protection policy)