How challenge and hindrance research stressors affect university teachers’ research performance: the mediating role of researcher identity and the moderating role of research environment

Objective: Under the national strategies of "Double First-Class" construction and innovation-driven development, research performance has become a critical metric for evaluating universities' core competitiveness and faculty members' academic contributions. However, university teachers generally face increasing research pressure in their pursuit of high performance, and traditional views have often simplistically regarded such pressure as a purely negative factor, thereby overlooking its potential positive motivational effects. To address this research gap, the present study investigated how challenge and hindrance stressors affect university teachers' research performance, with a focus on the mediating role of researcher identity and the moderating role of the research environment. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 560 university teachers in China. Descriptive statistics as well as reliability and validity tests were performed using SPSS 25.0. A structural equation model was constructed using AMOS 26.0 to test the mediating effect of research role identity, and hierarchical regression analysis was employed to examine the moderating effect of the research environment. Results: The results showed that both types of stressors influenced research performance, with challenge stressors and hindrance stressors exerting opposite effects. Research role identity partially mediated the relationships between both types of stressors and research performance. Moreover, the quality of the research environment not only directly promoted research performance but also significantly moderated the relationship between research role identity and research performance; specifically, a high-quality research environment strengthened the facilitative effect of role identity on performance. Conclusion: Theoretically, this study reveals the dynamic adaptive mechanism between research pressure and research performance, extending the challenge-hindrance stressor framework to the higher education context. Practically, it recommends that universities differentiate the nature of stressors, strengthen the cultivation of teachers' research role identity, and improve research environment support systems to facilitate the positive transformation of research pressure into performance improvement.