Employees' Exceedingly Difficult Goals and Subjective Well-Being: A Moderated Mediation Model of Emotion Regulation and Goal-Striving Stress

Abstract

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Employees’ well-being in the workplace is paid more attention nowadays because people’s work and life are inseparable. Job performance has a huge impact on the employee’s mental state and vice versa. Setting a challenging goal is an organizational strategy for motivating employees to reach higher performance. It is not surprising that exceedingly difficult goals raise goal-striving stress and damage employee’s subjective well-being. This study examined the psychological consequence of exceedingly difficult goals in goal-setting theory and provided companies with directions to solve this issue. The number of valid questionnaires were collected 356 Taiwanese high-tech engineers via online survey through the PTT tech-job page. We analyzed the data by PROCESS and tested the mediation effect of goal-striving stress on the negative relationship between exceedingly difficult goals and subjective well-being and also emotion regulation with two dimensions of cognitive appraisal and expressive suppression had significant moderation on the indirect effect of exceedingly difficult goal on subjective well-being via goal-striving stress. This study found that goal-striving stress mediated the effect of exceedingly difficult goals on subjective well-being, and only expressive suppression moderated the indirect effect of exceedingly difficult goal on subjective well-being via goal-striving stress rather than cognitive appraisal. This study fulfilled the research gap on the consequence of over challenging goals applied by goal-setting theory and expand the literatures on emotion regulation strategy selecting. We highly recommend companies starting to revisit their motivation strategy, develop stress management and emotion regulation training courses, and set proper support policies to improve employees’ well-being.