Coping with organizational stress among hospital nurses in Southern Ontario

Government cutbacks and anticipated staff reductions were hypothesized to be a unique source of organizational stress. The study focused on how nurses coped with stress and whether any strategy effectively reduced occupational stress. A sample of 107 nurses were asked to rate their occupational stress, job satisfaction, and coping strategies. Avoidance and social support were found to be significantly correlated with stress, but neither of these coping strategies appeared to reduce nurses’ level of organizational stress. However, an interaction between problem solving and job satisfaction was found to be highly significant and it added 42% to predicting stress levels. Supporting the stress-buffering hypothesis, nurses with lower intrinsic job satisfaction seemed to benefit from employing problem solving as a coping strategy whereas dissatisfied nurses who infrequently use problem solving reported the highest levels of organizational stress. Paradoxically, intrinsically satisfied nurses who most frequently utilize problem solving experienced heightened organizational stress.