How does positive work-related stress affect the degree of innovation development?

Many studies sustain that work-related stress exerts pervasive consequences on the employees’ levels of performance, productivity, and wellbeing. However, it remains unclear whether certain levels of stress might lead to positive outcomes regarding employees’ innovativeness. Hence, this paper examines how the five dimensions of work-related stress impact on the employees’ levels of innovation performance. To this aim, this study focused on a sample of 1487 employees from six Italian companies. To test the research hypotheses under assessment, we relied on the use of the partial least squares (PLS) technique. Our results reveal that, in summary, the stressors job autonomy, job demands, and role ambiguity exert a positive and significant impact on the employees’ levels of innovativeness. However, this study failed to find evidence that the supervisors’ support–innovation and colleagues’ support–innovation links are not statistically significant.