Coping, Personality and the Workplace

Book excerpt: How an individual responds to crises and critical incidents at work, both immediately and subsequent to the event, is heavily influenced both by personality characteristics and their use of coping strategies. These can, in turn, be affected by levels of education, gender and even the profession within which the individual is working. Coping, Personality and the Workplace offers theory, research and practice on our ability to cope with dangerous situations, critical incidents or other work crises. The chapters include perspectives on social and health habits and risks; gender and age differences as well as a range of different sources of threat: financial, psychological and physical; those within and outside the individual’s control; immediate and chronic. For organizations, this collection provides help and advice to build into employee safety and support programmes; for policy makers, a sense of the emerging sources of risk related to occupational health and for researchers, an anthology of original applied research from some of the leading authors in three continents.