Abstract: While challenge stress has received considerable attention in the literature, current researches generally investigate the positive results of challenge stress on employees themselves but seldom concentrate on its negative results. In fact, good stress for individuals is likely to have a bad influence on others through interpersonal interactions-particularly among unequal leader-member relations. Based on the explicit monitoring theory, leaders may become self-focused under challenge stress, immersing themselves in the coping process of self-participation but ignoring the autonomy of subordinates when they advance work. We introduce this theory to propose that challenge stress undertook by leaders would decrease their empowering behaviors, thus adversely affecting subordinates' creativity. A large-scale investigation survey is conducted by three stages to branch teams of a world's top-500 company located in China's eastern cities of an environment in need of employees' creativity. This paper reveals the process about how team leaders' challenge stress brings negative effects on employees' creativity by the mechanism of leader's empowering behaviors. Moderating effects of leaders' accountability to superiors on the above mediating effect are verified, while the moderating role of leaders' accountability to inferiors is not found. This paper expands the research on the role of work stress from the intra-person effect on oneself to the interpersonal impact of leaders on subordinates, and has implications for the theoretical research and management practice of work stress and creativity in organizations.

Key words: challenge stress, empowering behavior, creativity, multilevel modeling