Despite growing attention to stressor-performance relationships in the construction industry, the dynamic, time-sensitive interplay of this relationship remains underexplored. This study adopted an idiographic approach to examine how stressor-performance interactions evolve over time within individual construction workers. Daily diary data from five participants over an eight-week period were collected following an approved ethical regime. By concentrating on intensive measures with a small number of workers, this study uncovers within-person stressor-performance dynamics that are obscured in traditional nomothetic analyses. Granger-causality analysis revealed no significant predictive effects of stressors on job performance or vice versa for Participants 2, 4 and 5. However, it revealed significant predictive effects of stressors on job performance in Participant 3; significant predictive effects of job performance on stressors in Participant 1 and Participant 3—indicating participant-specific dynamics. Impulse response function analysis highlighted the time-sensitive nature of these dynamics: for Participant 1, improved job performance initially reduced stressor levels, with effects peaking on the second day before gradually dissipating. Variance decomposition analysis revealed various endogenous and/or exogenous contributions of stressors and job performance. The overall stressor and career development stressor from Participant 1, and role management stressor from Participant 3, were primarily explained by their own past values. Participant 3′s organisational style stressor was explained by its own past values for the first 4 days, and thereafter by job performance. By identifying how these dynamics unfold at the intra-individual level, the study underscores the importance of tailored stressor-monitoring and performance-support strategies and presents thirteen propositions for future research.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)