Examining the Stress and Coping Process in a Distributed Work Environment

Individuals working in distributed arrangements experience chronic context-specific stressors with potentially little social support from the organization, their supervisors, and work colleagues. There is little available information regarding the types of stressors experienced by distributed team members and the strategies they use to cope with them. The purposes of the study were to assess coping strategies used by distributed team members when dealing with context-specific occupational stressors as well as the relationship between perceived social support and the types of coping strategies used. The transactional model of stress and the conservation of resources theory provided the theoretical framework. The critical incident technique, a phenomenological-based paradigm, informed the methodology. A purposive sample of 25 employees from a pharmaceutical organization completed an online questionnaire. The resultant data were thematically analyzed by means of inductive content analysis as described by Elo & Kyngäs. Information, involvement, demand and change emerged as the 3 most salient stressor themes. Most respondents perceived a lack of social support and identified ambiguity, not preparable, support, uncertainty, unannounced expectations, value, effectiveness and health/energy as antecedents of strain. Problem-focused coping was typically used to deal with information and demand related challenges and emotion-focused coping to deal with change related challenges. Problem-focused coping resulted in satisfactory outcomes and an association between the use of emotion-focused coping and unsatisfactory outcomes was identified. This study contributes to positive social change by exploring key elements of the stress and coping process; such understanding can be used to develop effective stress management interventions.