Hope, commitment, and stress mediating between leadership, financial resources and CAHP performance

Combining the goal setting and job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, we examined how highly collaborative leadership and ample financial resources affect high project performance in community-academic health partnerships (CAHPs) through three mediators: individual project workers’ hope, goal commitment and stress levels. With a sequential explanatory mixed-method research design we collected and analyzed survey data (N = 318) and held semi-structured interviews (N = 21). The hypothesized three-path mediation model was tested using structural equation modelling with bootstrapping. Project workers’ hope, goal commitment and stress: (1) fully mediate between highly collaborative leadership and high project performance; and (2) partially mediate the relationship between ample financial resources and high project performance. The qualitative data corroborated these findings, revealing the crucial role of hope as a cognitive-motivational mechanism that facilitates project workers’ coping strategies during the various challenges of the diverse CAHP projects. These findings contribute to the project management and CAHP literatures by accounting for the effects of project workers’ hope in enabling high CAHP project performance as well as for two other under-researched CAHP project resources (ample financial resources and collaborative leadership), Moreover, we show the applicability of combining goal-setting and JD-R theory in networked health-promotion projects that link academic to community work.