Stress resilience: researching a key competence for professionals in communication management

Abstract

PurposeNowadays, communication practitioners are well-equipped with all kinds of skills and competencies. Nevertheless, those capabilities seem not to prevent professionals from stress and burnout. Stress resilience, i.e. the ability to deal with high demands at work, to cope with and recover from stress, seems to be a missing competence. This study sheds light on this important, but barely discussed aspect of communication management.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative approach was applied to understand sources of stress and to identify opportunities to build stress resilience competence. Therefore, 40 in-depth interviews with senior leaders and young professionals in 30 agencies in the largest countries on two continents were conducted (United States vs Germany).FindingsThis study revealed common and threat drivers of stress. Overall, the work environment can be summarised as highly demanding and multifaceted, where stress resilience might be a useful competence to have to be successful and to be protected against negative stress outcomes such as burnout. The study identifies several reasons why resilient professionals are more successful in coping with stress. It is further shown that most communication agencies in the sample have already implemented programmes to increase employees' resilience.Originality/valueThis study offers an alternative view on the much-debated future of work by using an interdisciplinary approach and large-scale, qualitative insights from the agency environment. A novel concept is introduced that can stimulate further research.

Demografik Özellikler Açısından İş Stresi Algısı: Konaklama Sektörü Örneği

“…Stresle başa çıkmada en önemli unsur strese dayanıklılıktır (Ziegele & Zerfass, 2021: 335). Dayanıklılık, kavram olarak stresli durumlardan kurtulmak ve kapasitesini artırmak için içsel ve dışsal kaynakların kullanımını ifade eder (Ziegele & Zerfass, 2021). Aynı zamanda dayanıklılık kişisel özelliklere ve umut, kendine güven veya öz yeterlilik gibi psikolojik durumlara da bağlıdır (Matthews, Lin, & Wohleber, 2017;Moreno, Navarro, Molleda, ve diğ., 2019).…”

Stress Factors and Ways of Coping for Public Relations Professionals in Romania

“…However, it appeals to conceptual corpus from psychology, focusing on stressors and their effects, considered to affect in separate ways the well-being, creativity and productivity of people working in PR, and on solutions to cope with stress, which are already used by PR professionals or that could be further implemented. Stress is referred to, by following the transactional model of Lazarus and Folkman, cited in Ziegele and Zerfass (2021), as "a combination of the feeling of being tense and having no available resources to manage it" (p. 336). As noted by Carver and Connor-Smith (2010, p. 683), considering "the experience of encountering or anticipating adversity in one's goal-related efforts, (…) stress exists when people confront situations that tax or exceed their ability to manage them".…”

“…Regarding stress-related impact and coping, important premises lie in the meaning attributed to the experience and the subsequent reaction respectively, not in the situation itself (Kenny & Cooper, 2003). An individual's response to stress can alleviate stress or cause even more stress (Jiang & Shen, 2013;Mazzola & Disselhorst, 2019;Ziegele & Zerfass, 2021).…”

“…Analysis on stressors and ways of coping with them represent a relevant approach in PR research, considering particularities of the profession (Guo & Anderson, 2018;Ziegele & Zerfass, 2021). As stated by Guo and Anderson (2018, pp.…”