Coping with work-nonwork stressors over time: A person-centered, multistudy integration of coping breadth and depth.

Abstract

Coping is a dynamic response to stressors that employees encounter in their work and nonwork roles. Scholars have argued that it is not just whether employees cope with work-nonwork stressors-but how they cope-that matters. Indeed, prior research assumes that adaptive coping strategies-planning, prioritizing, positive reframing, seeking emotional and instrumental support-are universally beneficial, suggesting that sustaining high levels of these strategies is ideal. By returning to the roots of coping theory, we adopt a person-centered, dynamic approach using latent profile analysis and latent transition analysis across three multiwave studies (N = 1,370) to consider whether employees combine coping strategies and how remaining in or shifting between such combinations also matters. In a pilot study (N = 361), we explored profiles and their transitions during a time frame punctuated with macrolevel transitions that amplified employees' work-nonwork stressors (i.e., COVID-19), which revealed three profiles at Time 1 (comprehensive copers, emotion-focused copers, and individualistic copers) and a fourth profile at Time 2 (surviving copers). In Study 1 (N = 648), across all three time points, we replicated three profiles and found evidence for constrained copers instead of emotion-focused copers. In Study 2 (N = 361), across both time points, we replicated all four profiles from Study 1 and tested hypotheses regarding the profiles, their transition patterns, and implications of such patterns for work, well-being, and social functioning outcomes. Altogether, our work suggests that maintaining high-coping depth or increasing depth is generally beneficial, whereas maintaining or increasing coping breadth is generally harmful. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).