Comparison of Strategies to Manage Stress Considering to Selected Socio-demographic Characteristics of Employees

Abstract

The presented paper deals with the analysis of selected stress management strategies considering to gender and position in organization in which individual employees work. The aim of the paper is to compare the ways of managing and processing the stressful situations, as well as their variability with regard to the group of respondents, their inclusion in the organization (manager or executive employee) and the size of organization (small and medium organization). The research was conducted by using two methodologies, namely Brief COPE from Carver (1997) and SVF 78 by Janke and Erdmann (2003). The research sample consisted of 130 respondents aged 19 to 63 (mean age 40.38 with a standard deviation of 6.73), namely 53.8% of males and 47.2% of women. The research sample consisted of executive employees (49.2%) and managers (50.8%) working in a small and medium-sized organization. The research results were analyzed by t-test for two independent samples, namely the individual stress management strategies were compared. We found statistically significant differences in the level of control of the situation, self-blaming, POZ 1 and NEG among executive employees and managers. At the level of perseverance, self-blaming, religiosity and spirituality, and NEG we found statistically significant gender differences. Comparison of employees working in a small and medium-sized organization has demonstrated the existence of statistically significant differences in levels of underestimation, negation, ventilation and self-blaming. The most common strategy of stress management was the strategy of self-blaming, given the analyzed socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents.