Tipping pressure as a societal stressor: Cognitive and emotional pathways to mastery experience

The present research investigated how tipping pressure relates to employees' mastery experience through cognitive and emotional mechanisms. Additionally, we examined the moderating roles of empathy and conscientiousness in these processes. Data were collected over seven consecutive weeks from 106 participants (57 male, 47 female, and 2 unspecified), yielding 623 observations. At the within-person level, tipping pressure predicted both rumination and negative emotions. However, neither rumination nor negative emotions exhibited unconditional mediation effects on mastery experience. Instead, evidence of moderated mediation emerged in the cognitive pathway: empathy moderated the relationship between tipping pressure and rumination, and conscientiousness moderated the relationship between rumination and mastery experience. No moderated mediation was observed for the emotional pathway. These findings suggest that the relationship between tipping pressure and mastery experience is conditional upon individual differences in self-regulatory processes rather than reflecting a general indirect effect.