1,592 publications from this institution
The psychological process of dealing with job stressors in order to reduce strain or negative health effects is called coping. More specially, coping with job stress refers to mental and behavioral strategies of employees to handle the stressors they encounter at work. Coping with job stress involves the dynamic interplay of the employee and his or her job environment or work setting that is appraised as stressful in terms of harm, threat, or loss. More recent conceptualizations of coping broaden the concept by emphasizing its proactive nature, that is, the mastery of positively appraised challenging demands.
Applying the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory as a framework, this study among Dutch nurses (n=156) first tested whether work-related demands, resources and self-esteem were differentially associated with the three burnout dimensions (emotional exhaustion, personal accomplishment and depersonalization), respectively. In addition, the current study investigated the interrelationships between the burnout dimensions and the hypothesized moderating effect of self-esteem. As expected, emotional exhaustion was primarily associated with job demands (i.e. work overload) and-to a slightly lower extent-with resources such as social support and self-esteem. In contrast, but also according to the authors' predictions, depersonalization and personal accomplishment were not associated with job demands. Emotional exhaustion was, as predicted, an important correlate of depersonalization, whereas reduced personal accomplishment was negatively associated with self-esteem and with quality of work content, a resource. In line with earlier findings but contrary to some recent propositions, reduced personal accomplishment was positively associated with depersonalization. Finally, self-esteem did not moderate the relationships between the selected work factors and the burnout dimensions. The limitations of the study are discussed and directions for future research are proposed.
