Abstract
Coping with stress has been primarily investigated as an individual-level phenomenon. In work settings, however, an individual’s exposure to demands is often shared with co-workers, and the process of dealing with these demands takes place in the interaction with them. Coping, therefore, may be conceptualized as a multilevel construct. This paper introduces the team coping concept and shows that including coping as a higher-level team property may help explain individual-level outcomes. Specifically, we investigated the effects of exposure to danger during deployment on burnout symptoms in military service members and examined to what extent this relationship was moderated by individual-level and team-level functional coping. We hypothesized that the relationship between individuals’ exposure to danger and burnout is contingent on both. In line with our predictions, we found that service members who were highly exposed to danger, and did not engage in much functional coping, suffered most from burnout symptoms, but only when their teammates did not engage in much functional coping either. When their teammates did engage in much functional coping, the effect of exposure to danger on burnout was buffered. Hence, team members’ coping efforts functioned as a resilience resource for these service members.
Highlights
Some jobs place extremely high demands on employees
We found that the harmful influence of exposure to danger could be buffered by team coping: Service members who were highly exposed to danger during their deployment, and who did not engage in much functional coping themselves, benefited from the coping efforts of their teammates, such that when their teammates did engage in functional coping, exposure to danger did not result in more burnout symptoms
The use of interpersonal strategies has always been part of theorizing about stress and coping (e.g., Van der Doef and Maes, 1999; Bakker et al, 2005), the present study shows that the influence of the social environment goes further; it is not just the social support one receives from others that helps in dealing with stress, it’s the way they cope with the stressors themselves that affects ones outcomes
Summary
Paramedics, firefighters, and military personnel, for example, are frequently exposed to life-threatening situations and hostile working conditions (Skogstad et al, 2013; Coenen and van der Molen, 2021). To prevent such exposure to danger from damaging psychological well-being and mental health (e.g., Pietrzak et al, 2009; Ramchand et al, 2015), individuals in highly demanding jobs need to engage in coping (Jex et al, 2001). Effective coping has been shown to moderate the effects of acute and chronic job demands on health, work engagement, and burnout outcomes (De Rijk et al, 1998; Angelo and Chambel, 2014; Searle and Lee, 2014).
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