Steering wheels to make ends meet: Understanding stressors and coping strategies among app-based taxi drivers in Tehran

Abstract

Management scholars' understanding of occupational stress and coping is predominantly based on experiences of workers in standard employment relationships with organizations. Interviewing 64 app-based taxi drivers in Tehran, we examined stressors and coping strategies embedded in a growing occupational context—low-skilled app-based jobs—in an understudied non-Western developing Islamic country. Our findings revealed six stressors embedded in our participants' occupational and country contexts. The drivers coped with these stressors with six strategies that comprised (a) hiding their job, (b) adjusting at work, (c) rationalizing, (d) self-sacrificing, (e) trusting God, and (f) looking for another job. Our paper responds to the call for contextual and international perspectives in careers research, and informs career scholars and practitioners interested in examining and addressing the needs of similar groups of workers in similar occupational and country contexts.