Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Coping With Interpersonal Conflicts At Work: An Examination Of The Goodness Of Fit Hypothesis Among Nurses, Robert Randon Wright

Dissertations and Theses

Increasingly, evidence indicates that workplace interpersonal conflicts (WIC) are the most upsetting/troublesome daily work stressors (Sulsky & Smith, 2007), and within the context of nursing, WIC is a problem of high prevalence and intensity (Baltimore, 2006; Farrell, 1999). In relation to coping with stressors such as WIC, Lazarus and Folkman (1984) established the transactional model of stress and coping, where cognitive appraisals of the stressor (e.g., perceived control) are central to coping and classified all coping behaviors as either problem-focused or emotion-focused. They also proposed the "goodness of fit hypothesis", which predicts that problem-focused coping efforts used to cope with …