Team Coping: Cross-Level Influence of Team Member Coping Activities on Individual Burnout

Abstract

Coping with stress has been primarily investigated as an individual-level phenomenon. In work settings, however, an individual’s exposure to demands is often shared with co-workers, and the process of dealing with these demands takes place in the interaction with them. Coping, therefore, may be conceptualized as a multilevel construct. This paper introduces the team coping concept and shows that including coping as a higher-level team property may help explain individual-level outcomes. Specifically, we investigated the effects of exposure to danger during deployment on burnout symptoms in military service members and examined to what extent this relationship was moderated by individual-level and team-level functional coping. We hypothesized that the relationship between individuals’ exposure to danger and burnout is contingent on both. In line with our predictions, we found that service members who were highly exposed to danger, and did not engage in much functional coping, suffered most from burnout symptoms, but only when their teammates did not engage in much functional coping either. When their teammates did engage in much functional coping, the effect of exposure to danger on burnout was buffered. Hence, team members’ coping efforts functioned as a resilience resource for these service members.

The multilevel well‐being paradox: Towards an integrative process theory of coping in teams

“…While individual‐level appraisal (i.e., an individual's assessment of a potentially stressful situation's relevance to their own goals and their ability to effectively cope with it) plays a crucial role in shaping how individuals manage stress and has been extensively studied in coping research (e.g., Cooper et al, 2001; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), individual‐level conceptualization of appraisal limits organizational scholars' ability to effectively study team‐level coping and well‐being. Furthermore, prior research on group level or collective coping (e.g., Kamphuis et al, 2021; Kuo, 2013; Rodríguez et al, 2019) has not adequately addressed how teams develop shared appraisal of individual‐ and team‐level stressors nor how they cope to preserve team‐level well‐being. We argue that the usage of aggregate or compositional measures of individual stressor appraisals in measuring team appraisal can limit the investigation of team‐level coping, overlooking the diversity of team members' different appraisals of individual level stressors (e.g., some may appraise remote work as a hindrance stressor for and others as a positive challenge for goal achievement).…”

“…While this research offers valuable insights into individual coping and well‐being, it does not address how coping unfolds in a context where individuals are part of teams dealing with stressors at both team and individual levels. On the other hand, a separate body of literature has examined group‐level coping, focusing on how teams collectively cope with shared stressors to maintain team performance (Drach‐Zahavy & Freund, 2007; Maruping et al, 2015; Razinskas & Hoegl, 2020) or preserve members' well‐being (e.g., Kamphuis et al, 2021). While these two streams of literature offer important insights into how coping may function as an intra‐individual or higher‐level construct, they do not explore how coping processes unfold across the different levels or how teams co‐construct stressful situations and make decisions regarding necessary coping actions to maintain both individual and team well‐being in parallel.…”