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The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered the daily lives of millions of people around the world, substantially increasing anxiety and stress levels for many. Psychological capital (PsyCap), a multidimensional construct that includes hope, optimism, resilience and self-efficacy, may serve as a resource for helping people more effectively cope with uncertainty resulting in lower levels of perceived stress. The authors hypothesize a negative relationship between PsyCap and perceived stress that is partially and differentially mediated by adaptive and maladaptive coping styles. The authors further hypothesize that work context (home vs workplace) will moderate the relationships between coping styles and perceived stress.

After receiving Institutional Review Board approval, data were collected during the first week of May 2020 using an online survey. The hypothesized model was tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques, specifically Mplus 8. The authors validated their initial findings using PROCESS Model 14 with 5,000 boot-strapped samples and a 95% confidence interval.

The authors’ results show that adaptive and maladaptive coping styles differentially mediate the effects of PsyCap on perceived stress with the indirect effects of PsyCap on perceived stress through maladaptive coping being stronger than the indirect effects through adaptive coping. The authors found support for the relationships in our hypothesized model.

The authors’ findings suggest that health interventions aimed at increasing PsyCap may be an effective means of reducing maladaptive coping and perceived stress. Future research should continue to explore PsyCap as a potential means of shaping positive health behaviors.

This study makes a unique contribution to the literature by explaining how PsyCap operates through coping to affect perceptions of stress in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper aims to investigate how the reparative efforts of extensive apologies, compensation and structural change affect trust after a violation has occurred. Specifically, this paper presents a cognitive process model positing that voluntary reparative efforts will shape the victim’s stability attributions for the cause of the violation such that it will be deemed less stable (i.e. unlikely to recur); as a result, the victim is more likely to perceive the transgressor as being fair, and hence extend subsequent trust.

Two experiments were conducted to test the cognitive process model.

The results of both experiments supported this predicted sequence for extensive apologies. Support for the predicted sequence was also found when compensation and structural change are invoked as reparative efforts.

This research has theoretical and practical implications for a more nuanced understanding of how causal attribution theory and organizational justice theory can be integrated within the context of trust repair.