A preview of this full-text is provided by American Psychological Association.
Content available from Journal of Applied Psychology
This content is subject to copyright. Terms and conditions apply.
RESEARCH REPORT
Promotion- and Prevention-Focused Coping: A Meta-Analytic Examination
of Regulatory Strategies in the Work Stress Process
Yiwen Zhang, Ying Zhang, Thomas W. H. Ng, and Simon S. K. Lam
University of Hong Kong
We provide a meta-analytic examination of the regulatory strategies that employees adopt to cope with
different types of stressors in the workplace and how these strategies are linked to work and personal
outcomes. Drawing from regulatory focus theory, we introduce a new taxonomy of promotion- and
prevention-focused coping that complements the traditional taxonomy of problem- and emotion-focused
coping in the transactional theory of stress. In addition, we propose that challenge stressors tend to evoke
promotion-focused coping, whereas hindrance stressors tend to evoke prevention-focused coping. As a pair of
important coping mechanisms in the work stress process, promotion-focused coping is positively related to
employees’ job performance, job attitudes, and personal well-being, whereas prevention-focused coping is
negatively related to these outcomes. We conducted an original meta-analysis of coping strategies in the
workplace and tested the hypotheses with 550 effect sizes drawn from 156 samples that involved a total of
75,344 employees. We also tested the tenability of the proposed stressor-coping-outcome processes using
meta-analytic path models and further examined the robustness of these models using full-information
bootstrapping technique. The results converge to show that promotion- and prevention-focused coping serve
as important intervening mechanisms that account for the relationships between work stressors and individual
outcomes.
Keywords: coping, work stress, regulatory focus
Stress occurs when environmental demands exceed or tax one’s
resources (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Transactional theory identifies
two central mechanisms in the stress process— appraisal, defined
as the cognitive evaluations of the nature of specific demands and
one’s own resources, and coping, defined as one’s goal-directed
cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage the demands (Lazarus &
Folkman, 1984). Over the past two decades, appraisal-centered re-
search has vastly advanced our understanding of work stress. Specif-
ically, the challenge-hindrance stressors framework suggests that em-
ployees appraise work demands as either challenges that have
potentials for rewards and personal growth (i.e., challenge stressors;
e.g., workload, task complexity, etc.) or hindrances that thwart growth
or gains (i.e., hindrance stressors; e.g., role ambiguity, office politics,
red tape, etc.; Cavanaugh, Boswell, Roehling, & Boudreau, 2000).
These appraisals consistently translate into differential work and per-
sonal outcomes (LePine, Podsakoff, & LePine, 2005;Podsakoff,
LePine, & LePine, 2007).
However, how employees cope with challenge and hindrance
stressors at work remains unclear. This is surprising given that
coping is identified as a crucial component in stress transactions
that follows appraisals and is more proximally relevant to out-
comes (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). In fact, although coping re-
search is very much alive in psychology generally (e.g., Connor-
Smith & Flachsbart, 2007;Skinner, Edge, Altman, & Sherwood,
2003), there is a lack of focused and systematic investigations of
coping strategies at work, as evidenced by the absence of prior
meta-analyses that examine the role of coping in the work stress
process despite being one of the classic topics in I-O psychology
(Bliese, Edwards, & Sonnentag, 2017).
Folkman and Lazarus (1980) differentiated coping that is di-
rected at managing or altering problems that cause distress (i.e.,
problem-focused coping) and coping that is directed at regulating
one’s emotional responses to such problems (i.e., emotion-focused
coping). Despite being the most commonly used structure for
categorizing ways of coping, this distinction may not adequately
account for the differential validities of challenge and hindrance
stressors that are both actual stimuli (i.e., problems) and loaded with
intense emotional reactions (Rodell & Judge, 2009). As Lazarus and
Folkman (1984) themselves pointed out, both problem- and
emotion-focused coping are “used by everyone in virtually every
stressful encounter” (p. 157).
In fact, in a comprehensive review of the coping literature,
Skinner, Edge, Altman, and Sherwood (2003) concluded that nei-
ther distinctions that describe coping functions (e.g., problem-
focused vs. emotion-focused) nor distinctions that describe coping
modes or methods (e.g., approach vs. avoidance, active vs. passive,
cognitive vs. behavioral) should be used as higher-order categories
for classifying ways of coping due to the lack of theoretical clarity
This article was published Online First April 4, 2019.
Yiwen Zhang, Ying Zhang, Thomas W. H. Ng, and Simon S. K. Lam,
Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Hong Kong.
This research was supported in part by the Ian Davies Endowed Profes-
sorship in Ethics held by Simon S. K. Lam. The authors are indebted to Mo
Wang and Lauren Simon for their ideas and suggestions on earlier drafts.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yiwen
Zhang, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Hong Kong, Pok
Fu Lam, Hong Kong, Hong Kong. E-mail: yzhang@business.hku.hk
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Journal of Applied Psychology
© 2019 American Psychological Association 2019, Vol. 104, No. 10, 1296–1323
0021-9010/19/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0000404
1296
