Abstract
Personality traits have often been highlighted to relate to how people cope with stressful events. The present paper focuses on character strengths as positive personality traits and examines two basic assumptions that were derived from a core characteristic of character strengths (i.e., to determine how individuals deal with adversities): (1) character strengths correlate with coping and (2) buffer the effects of work-related stress on job satisfaction. Two different samples (i.e., a mixed sample representing various occupations [N = 214] and a nurses sample [N = 175]) filled in measures for character strengths, coping, work-related stress, and job satisfaction. As expected, intellectual, emotional, and interpersonal strengths were related to coping. Interpersonal strengths played a greater role for coping among nurses, as interactions with others are an essential part of their workday. Furthermore, intellectual strengths partially mediated the negative effect of work-related stress on job satisfaction. These findings open a new field for research on the role of personality in coping with work-related stress. Character strengths are trainable personal characteristics, and therefore valuable resources to improve coping with work-related stress and to decrease the negative effects of stress. Further research is needed to investigate this assumed causality.
Highlights
Within the work-context, work-related stress is an issue with a strong impact on employees, organizations, and the communities (e.g., Vagg and Spielberger, 1998; Hodapp et al, 2005)
The present paper focuses on character strengths as positive personality traits
Mean of the General Job Satisfaction (GJS) was considerable above the scale midpoint of 2.5 in both samples
Summary
Within the work-context, work-related stress is an issue with a strong impact on employees, organizations, and the communities (e.g., Vagg and Spielberger, 1998; Hodapp et al, 2005). Typical work-related stressors are, for example, workload, time pressure, and conflicts with co-workers (Vagg and Spielberger, 1998). People cope with stress in different ways to prevent or diminish it directly (i.e., reduce the stressor) or indirectly (i.e., reduce associated distress; Carver and Connor-Smith, 2010). Personality traits have often been highlighted to relate to how people cope with stressful events (e.g., Grant and Langan-Fox, 2006; Connor-Smith and Flachsbart, 2007)
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