Impact of Yoga on Coping Styles of Mid-Level Managers-An Experimental Study

Abstract

Recently, the daily news is overloaded with reports of human atrocities in the society due to the presence of uncontrolled emotions in human life. This is because of high degree of anger and frustration caused by the manifestation of emotional weaknesses which leads individuals in adopting negative coping styles. Research studies have shown that yoga has played a constructive role in enhancing emotional intelligence which in turn leads to adaptation of positive coping style. But how far yoga impacts one's coping style on mid-level managers has not been dealt so far and hence the current study is undertaken to explore the research gap. For this purpose an experimental study on 105 mid-level managers belonging to HTC Global Services, Chennai was undertaken. The mid-level managers were divided into 70 and 30 mid-level managers under experimental and control group respectively. The Simplified kundalini yoga training was imparted for 25 sessions, each session consisting of 1hour 15 minutes. Data was elicited through multi-dimensional coping inventory (Carver et al., 1989) from both the groups before and after Simplified kundalini yoga training. Paired‘t’ test was used to analyze the collected data and the results has shown significant improvement in emotion focused coping and significant decrease in avoidance focused coping in the experimental group after Simplified kundalini yoga training in comparison to the control group. Though increased mean scores for problem focused were observed after yoga training in comparison to control group, the results were not statistically significant. Therefore, the present study has revealed that regular practice of yoga can have an impact in making individuals adopt a positive coping style and reduces maladaptive coping to an extent to face challenges in their career and attain success in life.