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Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) stress and coping framework in the context of work-related interpersonal stressors. Drawing on Long, Kahn, and Schutz's (1992) stress and coping model for managerial women, I examined the relative influences of individual differences, cognitive appraisals, coping strategies, and the work environment on the experiences of distress for managerial and professional women who reported interpersonal conflicts as a source of occupational stress. The data were collected prospectively from 157 managerial and professional women (M age 41.2) employed at three-provincial universities. Participants completed three sets of questionnaires administered 2-weeks apart. The first set of questionnaires assessed demographic characteristics and dimensions of participants' personality (gender-role orientation and trait anxiety); the second set assessed stress appraisals, coping strategies (engagement and disengagement), the work environment, and experiences of daily hassles; and the third set assessed psychosomatic distress. Path analysis using LISREL VIII (Jöreskog & Sorbom, 1993) was performed to examine the hypothesized relationships among antecedent, contextual, mediating, and outcome variables central to Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) theoretical framework and Long et al.'s (1992) stress and coping model. Based on the first-order partial correlation matrix, controlling for the effects of negative affective traits, results indicated an overall poor fitting model, X² (41, N=157)=124.89, p