Tuning in to the rhythm: The role of coping in strategic management of work-life conflicts in the public relations profession

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Highlights

  • A national survey of PRSA members is conducted to quantify work-life conflict and explore the role of coping in work-life conflict management.

  • Work-life conflicts are found to be derived from work-driven, life-driven, and behavior-driven stressors.

  • Active practitioners have strong preferences in using more proactive conflict coping strategies, as opposed to more passive strategies.

  • Immediate supervisor support and work-life culture are found to be important in understanding how practitioners cope with work-life conflict.

  • Coping strategies are found to be influenced significantly by demographic characteristics as gender and education level.

Abstract

How public relations practitioners cope with work-life conflict was studied through a national survey of a random sample of PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) members. These active practitioners reported strong preferences in using more proactive conflict coping strategies, such as rational action and positive thinking. Women and those with a graduate degree tend to report more coping behaviors than others. Three types of stressors are identified as sources of work-life conflict: behavior-driven, work-driven, and life-driven.

According to our findings, while behavior-driven work-life stressors are associated with proactive coping strategies such as rational action and positive thinking, work-driven stressors tended to trigger more avoidance. Non-work driven stressors seem to predict more passive coping tendencies, such as denial and avoidance.

Organizational factors are found to be important in understanding how practitioners cope with work-life conflict. As organizational demands increased to separate life from work, more instructions seemed necessary for employees to better cope with work-life conflicts. Positive thinking, as a type of cognitive coping, tends to increase when there is more immediate supervisor support and to decrease when an organization's work-life culture is skewed toward promoting work as the sole priority.

Introduction

Work-life balance has been a critically important issue in business management and employee communication. In the past decade, business and communication professionals have discussed this topic and its impact on employee performance and business outcomes from different perspectives. Some perceived it as a constraining factor, as a The Strategist (2006) article mentioned, “The overriding factor in [senior executives] choosing not to be CEO is the absence of a positive work/life balance” (p. 19). Some framed it as “a myth” (Gordon, 2012, p. 7) in the sense that many professionals struggle to balance the scales of work and life on a day-to-day basis with little satisfying outcomes. The more constructive view may be “the dance between work and life is more about rhythm than balance” and to compare “the rhythms of work and life with the rhythms of nature” (Gordon, 2012, p. 7).

In the context of the public relations profession, Jin (2010a) pointed out that although public relations practitioners often effectively help organizations handle stressful situations internally and externally, they nevertheless are themselves often caught in work-life conflicts. Those conflicts bring stress. If not managed or coped with effectively, these work-life conflicts could negatively affect practitioners’ work efficiency and life satisfaction.

Research has been conducted to explore the nature of work-life balance, as well as the determinants and outcomes in different circumstances. For example, Bloom, Kretschner, and van Reenen, (2011) studied the determinants and consequences of a family-friendly workplace, emphasizing human capital as a potential firm resource. They found that family-friendly cultures do not directly affect the workplace, but rather enhance the ability of employees to combine their work and personal life. Wang and Verma (2012) emphasized that different industries vary in the adoption of work-life balance programs, which supports the institutional theory of organizational responsiveness to work-life balance issues.

As Sha (2011a) summarized, the public relations profession has changed greatly over the years in terms of the practice and required professional competencies, which emphasizes the need for “communication skills, knowledge of media and management, problem-solving abilities, motivation, and intellectual curiosity” (Broom, 2009, p. 48). Among the knowledge, skills and professional competencies for public relations practice (see Sha, 2011a), stress coping skills are necessary for practitioners to better manage work-life conflicts (Jin, 2010c). According to Jiang (2012), the significance of work-life conflict and how to manage it has been recognized by increasingly numbers of researchers. However, there is still a scholarship gap when it comes to systematically exploring work-life conflict and how the public relations profession should address it effectively (Aldoory, Jiang, Toth, & Sha, 2008).

One key facet of this scholarship gap is the need to fully understand coping and the role of this complex psychological process in practitioners’ effective management of work-life conflicts, in contrast or in addition to the existing predominant theoretical framework based on the institutional theory of organizational responsiveness (see Wang & Verma, 2012). Coping, as a relatively new construct in public relations research, has been integrated and applied primarily to understanding crisis and strategic conflict management (e.g., Jin, 2009, Jin, 2010b, Jin and Hong, 2010). In Aldoory et al.’s (2008) pioneering work on work-life conflict, practitioners’ coping strategies were studied and examined qualitatively.

Section snippets

Defining work-life conflict and balance

Work-life conflict, with varied degrees, occurs when the requirements from employees’ work and the obligations from their personal life become incompatible (Reynolds, 2005). The definition of work-life conflict is grounded in conflict theory (see ten Brummelhuis & van der Lippe, 2010), which provides a theoretical perspective to assess effectiveness of work-life policies. As ten Brummelhuis and van der Lippe (2010) stated, “Conflict theory proposes that using human time and energy in one role

Method

An online survey was conducted from December 2010 to January 2011 with randomly selected members of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). According to Hazleton and Sha (2012), the PRSA membership can be used as a sampling framework because it contains the necessary information allowing researchers to calibrate survey results against the larger population of public relations practitioners. In the present study, the survey response rate was 18.6% (n = 876 of 4714). Data analysis excluded

Respondent characteristics

Of the 565 active practitioners completing the work-life conflict coping components of the survey, 21% were male and 79% were female. The vast majority (88%) were white, with 6% of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin, 4% African American, and 2% Asian, Pacific Islander, or Asian American. The mean age of the respondents was 42. The highest education received by most of the respondents was some college or a bachelor's degree (51%), while 32% had a master's degree and about 2% had a doctorate in

Discussion and implications

Practitioners reported strong preferences in using more proactive conflict coping strategies, such as rational action and positive thinking. Women and those with a graduate degree tend to report more coping behaviors than did others. Three types of stressors are identified as sources of work-life conflicts: behavior-driven, work-driven, and life-driven, the categorization of which is based on the perspective of a work versus life dichotomy and behavior (in)consistency across work and life.

While

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