Coping, Personality and the Workplace

Responding to Psychological Crisis and Critical Events

Alexander-Stamatios Antoniou, Cary L. Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317159605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Personalmanagement

How an individual responds to crises and critical incidents at work, both immediately and subsequent to the event, is heavily influenced both by personality characteristics and their use of coping strategies. These can, in turn, be affected by levels of education, gender and even the profession within which the individual is working. Coping, Personality and the Workplace offers theory, research and practice on our ability to cope with dangerous situations, critical incidents or other work crises. The chapters include perspectives on social and health habits and risks; gender and age differences as well as a range of different sources of threat: financial, psychological and physical; those within and outside the individual's control; immediate and chronic. For organizations, this collection provides help and advice to build into employee safety and support programmes; for policy makers, a sense of the emerging sources of risk related to occupational health and for researchers, an anthology of original applied research from some of the leading authors in three continents.

PART I
CONCEPTUALIZATION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

1
Coping and Personality: Approaches, Measurement and Challenges

Philip Dewe

Introduction

How people cope with stress is, as Aldwin suggests, ‘of immediate personal relevance’ (Aldwin 2000, p. 73) helping to explain what has been described as a ‘boundless enthusiasm for’, (Somerfield and McCrae 2000, p. 620) and ‘a dramatic proliferation’ (Folkman and Moskowitz 2004, p. 745) of, coping research over the last three decades. Re-emerging out of this enthusiasm has been ‘a strong interest’ in the relationship between personality and coping (Watson, David and Suls 1999, p. 120) and the ‘immense importance’ of personality in helping to understand how people cope (Vollrath 2001, p. 335). Nevertheless, despite personality being described as revealing its dynamic self under stress (Bolger 1990) and that coping should now be defined as personality in action (Vollrath 2001) research on the coping-personality relationship is not without controversy, debate and challenges. A rich history surrounds coping and personality and this chapter begins by tracing the evolution of this relationship across what Suls and his colleagues describe as three generations of research (Suls, David and Harvey 1996). From what we mean by personality and coping and the debate surrounding how these concepts are defined the chapter then turns to the advances that researchers have made in exploring specific personality traits and coping followed by how coping-personality research has been ‘reinvigorated’ by the adoption of a more ‘unified framework’ (Vollrath 2001) for exploring personality described as the five-factor personality model or simply the Big Five (Carver and Connor-Smith 2010; Connor-Smith and Flachsbart 2007; Suls et al. 1996; Watson et al. 1999). None of these developments escape criticism, controversy and challenges and the chapter concludes by exploring some of this unfinished business before looking at the way ahead.

A Short History

In their overview of the history of coping and personality Suls and his colleagues identify three generations of research (Suls and David 1996; Suls et al. 1996). The first they describe as falling under the rubric of psychoanalytic-ego development-psychology. Here coping was viewed as a defence mechanism reflecting the way in which the ego dealt with internal conflicts. These mechanisms were assumed to be expressions of personality, reflecting a consistent style of coping (Aldwin 2000, 2007). Hierarchies of defence mechanisms and their type and functions soon followed (see Aldwin 2000; Suls et al. 1996). However, weighed down by their number, range and classification, and beset at times by conceptual, measurement and empirical issues, ‘it is scarcely surprising’ that this perspective where personality and coping were viewed as the same thing was seen as ‘too inflexible’ (Suls and David 1996, p. 993) to capture the dynamics of the coping process compelling researchers, if they were to understand the personality-coping relationship, to separate coping from personality.

The psychodynamic perspective of coping did however lead researchers towards exploring ‘trait like propensities or styles of coping’ (Suls et al. 1996, p. 713). Early work on traits or coping styles was to become beleaguered by the belief that ‘they were poor predictors of behaviour’; a belief that soon led to the questioning of the predictive power and role of personality itself (Suls et al. 1996, p. 714). The coming of the second generation of research, initiated somewhat by feelings of discontent with the psychodynamic perspective (Suls et al. 1996), shifted attention to an entirely new focus in understanding the personality-coping relationship. It would, however, be a mistake to believe that the debate surrounding traits was over or that a dispositional view of coping had lost its relevance (Watson et al. 1999), or its potency to be rekindled by advances in our knowledge (Suls et al. 1996; Vollrath 2001). In fact, if anything, as we will see, it remains the one enduring theme throughout any discussion of personality and coping.

The second generation of research describes the transactional perspective and takes its name from the work of Lazarus (1966) and his transactional model of stress. The power of Lazarus’s work and its significance lies in his process-oriented cognitive-relational view of stress. This view builds on the premise that stress results from the transaction between the individual and the environment. Expressed in this way, argues Lazarus (1990, 1999), stress does not simply reside in the person or in the environment but in the relationship between the two. What distinguishes the transactional model from earlier interactional models of stress is that in the latter person and environment ‘retain their separate identities’ whereas a transactional relationship offers ‘a new level of discourse’ where these separate variables are now ‘fused into a special kind of relationship’ (Lazarus 1998, pp. 188–9) that is imbued with meaning. These meanings Lazarus (1999, 2000) describes link the person and the environment and are expressed through a ‘process of appraisal’ (Lazarus 2000). It is the appraisal process that shapes the nature of a particular encounter. Two types of appraisal are present separated not by timing but by content as each is engaged together and give the process its dynamic emphasis. The first is primary appraisal where the person gives meaning to the encounter and appraises the significant of ‘what is at stake’ (Lazarus 2001). Secondary appraisal is concerned with ‘what can I do about it?’ It is where the coping resources are appraised and ways of coping determined.

The role that personality plays in Lazarus’s process oriented transactional model has been the focus of considerable debate (Ben-Porath and Tellegen 1990; Costa and McCrae 1990; Krohne 1990; Lazarus 1990; Suls et al. 1996; Watson 1990). If we are concerned with concepts like appraisal, argues Lazarus (1999), then researchers are faced with a dilemma because such concepts reflect a process and therefore imply change rather than stability. While appraisals are ‘sensitive to’ and ‘may vary with personality’, Lazarus goes on to argue (1999, pp. 15–16), the idea of process, and therefore the notion of change, should not be obscured by the idea of stability that accompanies the notion of personality traits or dispositional styles. In turning to the role of personality traits in his research Lazarus admits to a ‘reluctant yes for neglect’ having, as he goes on to argue, given more emphasis to process issues than dispositional issues (1990, p. 42). On the other hand, while not denying the significance of personality in the stress process, it was more a case, as Lazarus points out, that ‘other research agenda were more important to us at the time’ (1990, p. 42).

While the subtleties of the debate, the detail of the arguments and the commitment and force with which they were expressed are not captured in this summary there does appear to emerge from this debate a call for a ‘newer approach to personality traits’ (Lazarus 1990, p. 43), an acknowledgement that we may be witnessing a revival and greater acceptance of the role traits play (Ben-Porath and Tellegen 1990), the view that as much attention should now be given to what a person is like as has been given to what a person does (Costa and McCrae 1990) and a shift in focus from an emphasis on ‘cognitive and situational determinants of coping’ to a growing interest in the role of personality in the stress process (Suls et al. 1996, p. 716). While reviewers generously acknowledge the way Lazarus has inspired researchers (Vollrath 2001), offered much to take forward through his theoretical and empirical work (Brief and George 1991), and that research ‘can only benefit from the careful and thoughtful application’ of his model (Harris 1991, p. 28) a number of factors were drawing researchers to a third generation of research which saw the convergence of personality and coping (Suls et al. 1996). Nevertheless, despite the revival of interest in the role of personality and the growing influence of a new, third generation of research, the second generation is more often thought of as the phase in which personality was more or less ‘dropped’ from the stress-coping model (Suls and David 1996, p. 996).

A number of factors helped to usher in a third generation of research linking personality to coping. Suls and his colleagues (1996, pp. 719–21) outline these as: (1) empirical work that showed situation variables being generally no better as predictors than traits helping to stimulate more research on traits and behaviour ‘in general’ and coping ‘in particular’ (p. 719); (2) the development of the ‘Big Five’ personality model and its reinvigorating effect on personality research and coping; (3) the recognition that both situational and individual determinants of coping were important in understanding the relationship; and (4) the acknowledgement that no coping strategy should simply be presumed as being inherently good or bad. Other factors that may be added to this list include the growing interest in health psychology and the way in which ‘personality traits may act as resources in the stress process’ (Vollrath 2001, p. 337), the fact that the third generation approach offered a different way of thinking about the ‘interplay’ between stressors, personality and coping (Suls et al. 1996, p. 721), the growing acceptance that although ‘hardly synonymous’ personality and coping overlap as constructs (Suls and David 1996, p. 994), and the discussion around the ways in which personality influences not just the way stress is coped with but how stress itself is experienced (Semmer 2006).

By pointing to the discrete and important role played by personality in the coping process the third generation of research ‘represents a significant departure from past efforts’ (Suls and David 1996, p. 996). Yet despite this progress unresolved conceptual and methodological issues (Suls et al. 1996) still remain to be resolved. These range from issues surrounding how personality and, more importantly, how coping is defined (Aldwin 2000; Coyne and Gottlieb 1996; Dewe and Cooper 2012; Snyder 1999, 2001; Suls et al. 1996; Suls and David 1996), the structure of coping and issues more generally surrounding the measurement of coping and accompanying operational and interpretive challenges (Coyne 1997; Coyne and Gottlieb 1996; Coyne and Racioppo 2000; Dewe and Cooper 2012; Folkman and Moskowitz 2004; Lazarus 1995; Semmer 2006; Somerfield 1997), and the measurement of traits including the apparent conceptual overlap between them, their structure and unidimensional nature, their relationship to other ‘well-established’ measures and their presumed uniqueness (Vollrath 2001, p. 337).

Many of these issues reflect the challenges that face all researchers investigating the complexity of the coping process and reflect the continual need to search for innovative and creative ways to advance our knowledge. Much progress has been made but personality does, and has been shown to have a varied role that extends beyond its relationship with coping per se, to include its influence on the nature of stressors themselves, the process of appraisal and the way it, in turn, is moulded by cultures and environments (Semmer 1996, 2006; Suls and David 1996; Suls et al. 1996). As much of this short history has drawn on the work of Suls and his colleagues it is important to acknowledge their analysis and reinforce their conclusion that this ‘new look’ vision of the third generation seems best placed to meet these challenges (1996, p. 731) Nevertheless, it is still necessary, as Semmer warns, to avoid the tendency of viewing coping as nothing more ‘than a problem of idiosyncratic behaviours’ and to continue to remind ourselves that not all differences between individuals are differences of personality (1996, 2006, p. 73). We now turn our attention to some of the challenges facing researchers.

Defining Personality

Personality has been described as a very wide ranging concept giving researchers a licence to explore it from a variety of theoretical approaches. It is no wonder then, that personality as Carver and Connor-Smith go on to suggest, ‘is easy to observe but hard to pin down’ (2010, p. 680). Broadly, personality is defined as ‘characteristic patterns of thoughts, feeling and behavior over time and across situations’ (Connor-Smith and Flachsbart 2007, p. 1080). At times words like dynamic and systems are used in definitio...