Coping strategies can affect how employees bounce back

Coping strategies can affect how employees bounce back

BY PAM SHERIDAN
Special to the Rice News

A new study by researchers at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management suggests that the way a salesperson copes with the frustration of losing a major sale may affect their future job performance.

“Because effective coping may help improve individual and organizational performance, managers would be wise to include emotional management in their employees’ training programs,” said Robert Westbrook, the William Alexander Kirkland Professor of Management at the Jones School.

In one of the first studies on coping in an actual work setting, Westbrook and his colleagues confirmed that without effective coping skills, negative emotions after a critical negative work event — such as the loss of a major sale — do affect performance.

“As these emotional episodes and their effects accumulate over time, the ability to cope effectively may account for substantial differences between individuals’ long-term performances,” Westbrook said.

In an article in the Journal of Applied Psychology titled “Good Cope, Bad Cope: Adaptive and Maladaptive Coping Strategies Following a Critical Negative Work Event,” Westbrook and his co-authors Steven P. Brown at the University of Houston and Goutam Challagalla at the Georgia Institute of Technology identify a variety of coping strategies, some of which buffer the impact of negative emotions on an individual’s performance and others that appear to adversely affect his or her ability to focus on the job.

When workers dwell on a negative event and vent their negative feelings, the researchers found that they tend to aggravate the adverse effects of their negative emotions on their performance. The more they vent, the stronger the adverse effect on their ability to do their job.

On the other hand, workers who exercise strong self-control and refrain from expressing or acting out their negative emotions do significantly temper their negative feelings. However, their performance suffers in the process.

“Self control is certainly effective in getting rid of the immediate negative feelings,” Westbrook said. “ But when individuals use all their energy to control their negative emotions rather than re-focusing on the job, their performance doesn’t improve.”

The study found the most effective means of coping in terms of job performance is to stay focused on the task. While this strategy did not appear to have any effect on negative emotions, workers who were more focused on their goals tended to be better performers.

“The best alternative to venting or mulling over circumstances surrounding a negative work event is to concentrate on the next step and stay on track toward achieving the goal,” he said.

As relevant as these findings are to a wide range of work situations, most sales training focuses on selling techniques and product knowledge, but doesn’t address the issue of how to cope when a negative event occurs on the job. Westbrook and his colleagues believe that the content of these training programs ought to be broadened to include emotional management.

The study also has implications for company recruiters and for managers. Westbrook suggests, for example, that during the hiring process, companies are looking for people who have the ability to manage their emotions. At the same time, managers need to coach their employees in coping strategies.

“Managers need to help guide their employees to learn from their experiences and get on with their work,” Westbrook said. “Unfortunately, the more common response is recrimination and blame.”

To confirm that their different dimensions of coping captured the fundamental aspects of a salesperson’s lost sale and emotional reaction, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with a group of salespeople employed by an industrial packaging firm.

The researchers then conducted a mail survey in which they asked the national sales forces of two different firms to describe the circumstances of recent sales loss in detail. They measured the workers’ negative emotions using an adaptation of Izard’s 1991 DES III scale and identified coping tactics from a version of Folkman and Lazarus’s Ways of Coping Questionnaire.

The researchers also asked the managers about each individual salesperson’s performance based on the sales volume they generated. They compared the workers’ feedback about their emotions and coping with the supervisors’ assessment of their performances to see how they were statistically related.

“Our study focused on one type of critical negative work event in an industrial selling context,” Westbrook said.
“It would be particularly worthwhile to analyze the effects of critical work events on long-term trends in individuals’ work behavior, performance and how coping helps shape these trends.”