Why some 'arousal' at work is actually good for employee performance

To be clear, this isn't that kind of arousal.

In psychology, the word refers to a person's level of physiological and mental alertness, not romantic interest. More than a century ago, psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson noticed that a moderate amount of this kind of arousal seemed to sharpen an animal's performance in lab experiments, while too much of it caused performance to fall apart.

Plotted on a graph, the relationship resembles an upside-down U. That idea became known as the Yerkes-Dodson law. It treats stress as a single dial that simply turns up or down.

Marcie LePine, a clinical professor in the department of management and entrepreneurship at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, doesn't see it that way.

"It's really assuming that stress is unidimensional, that it's just one thing," LePine said. "What I find in my research is that there are several things going on when we say we feel stressed."

Three pieces of the same puzzle

Blake Hargrove, an associate professor of management at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, has spent his career studying how stress affects people at work, breaking it down into what causes it, how people respond to it, and what happens as a result.

Hargrove said the word "stress" gets used so loosely that it actually confuses people. He breaks it into three separate ideas: the stressor, the response, and the outcome. A stressor is whatever triggers a person's nervous system, like a car cutting someone off in traffic. The response is what happens next, whether that's panic, anger, or a calm reaction born of experience. The outcome is what results over time, whether that's a moment of focus or, if it happens often enough, burnout.

"People have to respond to stressors or they literally can't survive. It's an absolutely essential adaptation. Stress responses are normal and adaptive for all biological creatures, including humans," Hargrove said.

He points to a psychologist named Hans Selye, who decades ago coined the term eustress to describe a stress response that helps a person rather than harms them.

"Eu is just the Greek word for good. It just means good stress," Hargrove said.

He described a professional musician stepping on stage. Elevated heart rate, sweating, a nervous energy that looks a lot like fear before the first note. The difference is what happens next. With the right training, support, and experience, that same physical response turns into focus rather than panic.

"That's how people get into flow, that's how people get into the zone. That is the outcome, the positive outcome associated with stress," Hargrove said.

The three faces of workplace stress

LePine's research identifies three distinct types of workplace demands, or stressors, each with a different, sometimes opposite, effect on performance.

Challenge stressors are demands like stretch assignments, added responsibility, or juggling multiple skills.

"These tend to be motivating up to a fairly high point," LePine said.

Hindrance stressors are different, made up of things like administrative hassles, unclear expectations, and office politics.

"Any amount of that adds a negative type of stress. It's really just a downward sloping line," she said.

LePine has recently added a third category to her framework, threat stressors, which cover interpersonal dynamics like being excluded or having ideas dismissed.

"This could be just dealing with toxic people within the workplace, but even things like people ignoring your ideas or excluding you from workplace camaraderie," she said. "That's even more detrimental than hindrance stressors, and that line slopes down immediately."

The distinction matters because it tells a manager what to actually do. Challenge stressors are worth encouraging, within reason. Hindrance and threat stressors need to be reduced or eliminated, since no amount of them helps anyone perform better.

Knowing when to pull back

Both researchers pointed to the same warning sign. Even a good, motivating stressor eventually needs a break. LePine tells her students to rate their stress on a simple scale.

"If you're hitting that three or four out of five, you better be thinking about taking that time for recovery," she said.

She also flagged the earliest stage of burnout to watch for.

"Am I beginning to feel exhausted? Am I tired when I wake up in the morning? As soon as you're feeling that exhaustion, you need to take time for recovery."

Hargrove made a similar point about limits.

"You have to limit both the magnitude and the duration of stressors," he said. "A leader should not aim for maximum performance all the time. If they want the good kind of response to stress, the stressors they give have to be limited in duration."

Burnout isn't just an HR buzzword, either. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines it as an occupational phenomenon, a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that hasn't been successfully managed. Depression and anxiety alone cost the global economy an estimated $1 trillion a year in lost productivity, according to the WHO. Even high performers aren't immune, and research shows that emotional strain on the job is linked to a higher risk of turnover.

How people label their stress seems to matter almost as much as the stress itself. HRD America recently examined whether younger workers are experiencing more genuine distress or are simply more likely to describe ordinary difficulty as a mental health condition. That question echoes a separate point Hargrove made about how the same stressor can register as eustress or its opposite, depending on how a person interprets it.

Leadership starts with well-being, not output

For Hargrove, this all comes back to what leaders choose to prioritize.

"I'm interested in people thriving and being healthy," he said. "The amount of stress, the type of stress people get, is a big part of their well-being. That's what employers and human resources professionals should care about."

LePine said finding that balance isn't only an individual's job. It depends heavily on what leaders model for the people who work for them.

"It really needs to be role modeled from the top," she said. "If people see that manager there from seven a.m. until seven p.m., they're going to feel like they need to be there as well."

She also connected recovery time to something less obvious, creativity. Short walks and conversations with colleagues, she said, are often where "collaborative ideas and innovation" come from, a point that lines up with HRD America's own reporting on why unstructured breaks can boost employee output.

Pressure at work isn't automatically good or bad. What matters, both researchers said, is the kind, the amount, and whether there's room to recover from it. Hargrove summed it up this way.

"I would say managing stress is a critical skill for every leader who cares for the well-being of their followers."