Coping Strategies of College Faculty Experiencing Stress and Burnout at Work

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine how faculty’s’ coping strategies were related to recovery from stressors at work. This study aimed to determine if available resources help them cope with the stress they experience at work, and whether such coping strategies were negatively related to burnout from the profession. It was predicted that the fewer resources faculty had available to use towards coping with their stress, the more stress they would experience, which was expected to relate to more burnout symptoms. Faculty at two different public universities were invited to complete questionnaires including the Conservation of Resources – Evaluation, Perceived Stress Scale, the brief COPE Inventory, and the Burnout Measure-Short Version. This study was an extension of prior work on stress, coping, and burnout in the workplace done in a K-12 context. The major question here was if findings would hold among university faculty working in the United States. A sample of 58 participants from UW-Stout and 14 participants from MNSU were collected. Correlation and regression analyses did not reveal support for the predictions. Implications and future research are discussed.