Procrastination, Stress and Coping among Primary School Teachers

Abstract

In this paper we focus on finding the relationship between procrastination as personal feature manifested by behaviour, which is characterized by the postponement of activities and tasks to a later time, with the experienced stress (expressed by cognitive, emotional, social and physical dimension) and the preferred strategies of coping with stress (proactive coping, reflective coping, strategic planning, preventive coping, instrumental support seeking, emotional support seeking, avoidance coping). Based on professional resources, we assumed a considerable positive correlation between procrastination and experienced stress – cognitive, emotional, physical and social, positive relation between procrastination and avoidance coping and negative relation between procrastination and proactive coping by 194 primary school teachers from Slovakia (173 females, 21 males, mean age 38.6 years). To measure the research variables we used: General Procrastination Scale (Lay, 1986), Questionnaire for identification of stress level and burnout syndrome (Henning & Keller, 1996) and Proactive Coping Inventory (Greenglass et al., 1999). We confirmed our assumptions and we found a significant positive correlation between procrastination and stress (cognitive dimension r=.512, p<0,001, emotional dimension r=.229, p=0,001, social dimension r=.331, p<0,001) and avoidance coping (r=.424, p<0,001). We identify the negative significant correlation between procrastination and proactive coping (r=-.422, p<0,001), reflective coping (r=-.244, p=0,001), instrumental support seeking (r=-.143, p<0,05), emotional support seeking(r= -.152, p<0,05).