Occupational Role Stress, Personal Effectiveness and Coping among Doctors and Journalists

During the past decade, globalization, increase in scale of operations and privatization policies have drastically changed conventional patterns in all sectors making stress commonplace. Organizational role stress and related fields have been subjects of much research, yet role stress among English mass media journalists and doctors has not been well examined. This study explores the extent and types of role stresses and coping strategies prevalent among Doctors and English media journalists. Since contemporary workplace is highly dependent on self-awareness and mutual understanding, personal effectiveness has a major role to play. The present study investigated occupational role stress, personal effectiveness and coping to assess inter-occupational (among doctors and journalists) and gender differences. The findings revealed that the journalists and doctors are experiencing high levels of role stress; inter role distance and resource inadequacy being the potent stressors. No significant gender differences were observed among various stressors except in inter-role distance. Significant differences between doctors and journalists were observed on the openness and perceptiveness dimensions of personal effectiveness. However, males and females were not observed to be different on any dimension. Journalists and doctors were found to be different on confrontative coping and escape avoidance coping styles, while males and females were found to be different on distancing, seeking social support, accepting responsibility and planful problem solving are the dimensions of coping.