Job Support, Coping, and Control: Assessment of Simultaneous Impacts Within the Occupational Stress Process

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Author(s)
Brough, Paula
Drummond, Suzie
Biggs, Amanda
Year published
2018
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The assessment of occupational stress is marred by an overwhelming adoption of simplistic research designs that generally fail to represent the complex reality of the occupational stress process. Informed by the theoretical tenants of both the transactional stress model and the job-demands-control–support model, this paper presents a rare simultaneous assessment of how two types of job demands (cognitive and emotional) are both moderated by job control and social support and mediated by coping for the prediction of work engagement and psychological strain over time. Self-report surveys were administered twice over 12 months ...
View more >The assessment of occupational stress is marred by an overwhelming adoption of simplistic research designs that generally fail to represent the complex reality of the occupational stress process. Informed by the theoretical tenants of both the transactional stress model and the job-demands-control–support model, this paper presents a rare simultaneous assessment of how two types of job demands (cognitive and emotional) are both moderated by job control and social support and mediated by coping for the prediction of work engagement and psychological strain over time. Self-report surveys were administered twice over 12 months to a sample of police-service workers and moderated mediation analyses were conducted on the matched sample of N = 2,481 respondents. The results offer support for the process of occupational stress by demonstrating how both accommodation and avoidance coping mediate the job-demands–outcome relationship over time. The results also demonstrate that this stressor-coping-strain process is simultaneously moderated by job support or job control. We found it interesting that this research also demonstrated that the estimation of work engagement was not unduly influenced by the type of job demands these police employees were exposed to.
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View more >The assessment of occupational stress is marred by an overwhelming adoption of simplistic research designs that generally fail to represent the complex reality of the occupational stress process. Informed by the theoretical tenants of both the transactional stress model and the job-demands-control–support model, this paper presents a rare simultaneous assessment of how two types of job demands (cognitive and emotional) are both moderated by job control and social support and mediated by coping for the prediction of work engagement and psychological strain over time. Self-report surveys were administered twice over 12 months to a sample of police-service workers and moderated mediation analyses were conducted on the matched sample of N = 2,481 respondents. The results offer support for the process of occupational stress by demonstrating how both accommodation and avoidance coping mediate the job-demands–outcome relationship over time. The results also demonstrate that this stressor-coping-strain process is simultaneously moderated by job support or job control. We found it interesting that this research also demonstrated that the estimation of work engagement was not unduly influenced by the type of job demands these police employees were exposed to.
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Journal Title
Journal of Occupational Health Psychology
Volume
23
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2018 American Psycological Association. This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. Reproduced here in accordance with publisher policy. Please refer to the journal link for access to the definitive, published version.
Subject
Psychology not elsewhere classified
Business and Management
Psychology