2012 PROCEEDINGS - Public Relations Society of America

Organizational factors are important in understanding how practitioners cope with worklife
conflict. The more organizational demands existed for separating life from work, the more
instructions seemed to be necessary for employees to better cope with work-life conflict. Positive
thinking, as a type of cognitive coping, tended to increase when there was more immediate
supervisor support and to decrease when an organization‘s work-life culture was skewed toward
promoting work as the sole priority.
Organizational Support is Essential to Proactive Coping
According to the survey results, there are six distinct types of coping strategies that are
used by practitioners in work-life conflict situations. These coping strategies are largely
aligned with Duhachek‘s (2005) multidimensional coping model. Noticeably, along with
positive thinking, denial, instrumental support, and avoidance, emotional support and
emotional venting provide better data fit when combined into one factor, emotional coping,
while rational thinking and action explain the results better when grouped under one factor,
rational action. Female practitioners tend to use more, i.e., a greater variety of, coping
strategies across the board, compared to male practitioners.
Among all coping strategies, proactive ones such as rational action and positive
thinking are the most used coping strategies among the practitioners surveyed in this study.
Organizational factors, together with conflict stressors, play a core role in facilitating or
preventing practitioners from proactive work-life conflict coping:
Rational action. According to Jin (2010), this type of coping is most objective and
proactive, often evidenced by the following: analyzing what is going on with one‘s work and life;
stepping back from the stressful conflict and being objective; controlling emotions in order to
avoid acting rashly; concentrating on pondering how a given problem can be resolved and
making a plan of action, which involves generating and assessing different potential solutions.
According to our findings, practitioners tend to implement rational action coping
strategies when the work-life conflict is predominately caused by work-related pressures and
exhaustion. If the stress is caused by non-work or family pressures, or by the frustration of not
being able to apply what works at work to non-work matters, practitioners tend not to use as
much rational thinking or action-taking to handle the situation. In short, practitioners cope with
work stressors more rationally, compared to how they cope with nonwork stressors.
Positive thinking. The primary constraining factor for practitioners to resort to positive
thinking is behavior-driven work-life stressors, meaning practitioners try and yet are often
frustrated by the fact that problem-solving behaviors at work do not translate well to non-work
problems. When practitioners are stressed by behaviors or problem-solving plans not applying to
both work and life, they tend to stay away from positive thinking. It is important for
practitioners, when feeling behavior-driven stressors, to be more mindful of their thought
processes of looking at the bright side of things or focusing on the positive aspects in both work
and life so as to make the best of the situation.
Organizational support is most helpful in facilitating this type of proactive coping among
practitioners. As our findings show, when there is more support from a practitioner‘s immediate
supervisor at work, more positive thinking is likely to be used in coping with work-life conflict.
In addition, whether an organization‘s culture is open or closed to work-life balance also
influences how much practitioners use positive thinking under stress: If an organization strongly
believes and acts as if work is the only priority for an employee, then positive thinking route to
coping is likely to be closed. This suggests that if an organization would like to make
practitioners look at the bright side of work-life conflicts, institutionally, the organization needs
97