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Job search behavior is an important factor of an individual's career. In this study, proactive individuals' search for career opportunities during the transition from unemployment to employment is investigated. This investigation concentrates on the “in-between jobs” phase to better understand career transition. Proactive coping is a particularly important aspect of the transition from unemployment to work.

Using the career self-management model and proactive coping theory, this paper establishes a conceptual model and adopts path analysis to examine the model with a sample of 208 unemployed workers from Poland.

The results indicate both direct and indirect effects for proactive coping on job-seeking behavior. Unemployed job seekers, with greater proactive coping, intensify their job search behavior and increase their chances for re-employment.

Proactive coping is an important factor in career development. The findings of this study are a promising starting point for career self-development training for unemployed workers in transition.

Most of the training for the unemployed prepares them to react and adapt to ongoing circumstances. Our findings show the importance of being proactive during active coping with unemployment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of participating in two domains, work and school, on the subjective wellbeing (SWB) and work‐school conflict (WSC), as well as the moderating role of proactive coping between WSC and SWB among Nigerian nontraditional students.

Using a cross‐sectional survey, data are collected from a total of 141 non‐traditional Master's in Managerial Psychology students at a university located in the South West of Nigeria.

Results of hierarchical multiple regression analysis reveal that work status is inversely related to SWB and positively related to WSC. Results also confirm the moderating role of coping; such that, as perceived WSC increased, non‐traditional students with moderate to high levels of coping reported greater SWB than those with low coping skills.

Statements on causality, with respect to the present findings, must be made with caution because of the self‐report nature of the study. Further, a global challenge of WSC was adopted in this study; nevertheless, one cannot underestimate the distinctive pattern of WSC that characterised Nigerian non‐traditional students. These could be explored in future studies to further enrich the literature on work‐school obligations and health outcomes.

Results of the present study suggest the need for employers' support as well as universities' flexibility to the needs of non‐traditional students.

The study fills a void in the literature, linking fulfillment of work‐school obligations to health‐related issues among adults (non‐traditional students) in an African setting.

The purpose of this study is to examine young consumers’ financial behavior (e.g. saving) and pro-environmental behavior (i.e. reduced consumption and green buying) as effective proactive strategies undertaken in the present to satisfy materialistic values and maximize well-being.

The study is based on an online survey among a panel of young American adults (N = 968).

The study finds a positive effect of materialism on personal well-being and negative effects on financial satisfaction, proactive financial coping and reduced consumption, but no effect on green buying, a separate and distinct pro-environmental strategy. Both proactive financial coping and reduced consumption are positively associated with subjective well-being.

Future research should re-examine conceptualizations of materialism in the context of climate change and the meaning of possessions in the global digital economy; studies could also focus on the specific well-being effects of reduced consumption and alternative pathways to align materialistic and environmental values.

Consumer education should look to models of financial education to demonstrate how limited natural resources can be managed at the micro level to enhance consumers’ subjective well-being, as well as reduce resource strain at the macro level.

Key contributions are the examination of materialism and consumption in the dual contexts of financial and environmental resource constraints and the effects of these key macro-social phenomena on consumers’ perceived well-being. Another study highlight is the differentiation of two strategies for proactive environmental coping, of which only one, reduced consumption, increased personal well-being and decreased psychological distress.

Building upon a competence-based employability model and a social exchange and proactive perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between learning value of the job and employability among academic staff employees. Moreover, this study also examined whether this relationship was moderated by leader–member exchange (LMX) and a proactive coping style.

An online self-report questionnaire with thoroughly validated measures was distributed among academic staff employees (n=139).

The results partially supported the specific study assumptions. Concrete, learning value of the job was positively related to anticipation and optimization, corporate sense and balance. LMX moderated the relationship between learning value of the job, on the one hand, and all employability dimensions, on the other hand. However, proactive coping only moderated the relationship with anticipation and optimization, flexibility and balance. In all cases, under the condition of high moderator variable levels, the relationship became stronger.

This study extends past employability research by applying an interactionist perspective (person: proactive coping style, context: LMX and learning value of the job) approach for explaining employability enhancement. The results of this scholarly work provide useful insights for stimulating future career development and growth, which is of upmost importance in nowadays’ labor markets.

Economic stressors such as job insecurity, job loss, unemployment, and underemployment cause severe difficulties for the workers affected, their families, organizations, and societies overall. Consequently, most past research has taken a thoroughly negative perspective on economic stress, addressing its diverse negative consequences and the ways that people try to cope with them. And even when following the advice provided by the scientific literature, people affected by economic stress will usually end up being off worse than they were before the onset of the stressor.

The current chapter pays credit to this perspective yet also tries to counterbalance it with an alternative one. While acknowledging the vast amount of literature outlining the negative consequences of economic stress on peoples’ well-being and careers, some literature also points at opportunities for a more positive perspective. More specifically, we argue that affected people can use a wide repertoire of behaviors for handling their current situation. Of particular promise in this regard is the concept of career adaptability, generally defined as the ability to change to fit into new career-related circumstances. Indeed, studies show that under certain conditions, career adaptability can facilitate people's search for not just any job but for a qualitatively better job, thus breaking through the spiral of losses usually associated with economic stress.

For the purpose of this argument, we link career adaptability to the concept of proactive coping, analyzing how and under which conditions career adaptability may present a contextualized form of proactive coping. We then address known personal and situational antecedents of career adaptability and show how career adaptability may be fostered and trained among different types of job seekers. We end this chapter with a discussion of open questions as well as directions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether descriptions of functional coping strategies among entrepreneurs vary along temporal dimensions, from reactive or present oriented, to anticipatory or future oriented. Future-oriented coping is largely unexplored in stress and coping studies in the entrepreneurship literature, despite evidence that a future time perspective is advantageous for entrepreneurs.

This study adopts an exploratory, qualitative approach: interviews were conducted with 22 entrepreneurs and coping strategies were classified, via thematic analysis, according to function, then time orientation.

Results confirmed that entrepreneurs’ coping strategies can be classified according to conventional functional taxonomies of coping that emphasize form (affective, behavioral, cognitive) and direction (change, adapt, disengage), but additionally suggested that time orientation may be an important dimension for classifying coping strategies in the entrepreneurship context.

The findings inform the assessment of coping strategies in future research on stress, coping and strain among entrepreneurs. In particular, researchers should assess temporal dimensions of coping alongside the functional dimensions which have been emphasized in past research. Assessment of meaningful dimensions of coping is necessary to identify adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies in future research. Knowledge of adaptive coping strategies among entrepreneurs can inform coping skills interventions for stress resilience.

This study makes a unique contribution to the emergent body of literature on stress and coping among entrepreneurs by utilizing both functional and temporal coping taxonomies to identify relevant dimensions of coping for study in this context.

Drawing on proactive coping theory, the authors aimed to test the mitigating effects of proactive personality on the relationships between work-to-family conflict and both work-related outcomes (i.e. career satisfaction and social network) and nonwork-related outcomes (i.e. life satisfaction and personal growth).

To increase the heterogeneity of sample, undergraduate students in a private university were randomly invited and then requested to invite any one of their parents, who had a full time job currently, to participate in the study. Sample size was 204, with a response rate of 75.56 percent.

As predicted, results showed that, for those who had a high level of proactive personality, the influences of work-to-family conflict on both work- and nonwork-related outcomes were all significantly mitigated, as compared with those who had a low level of proactive personality.

In this paper, the authors initiated a new insight into work-family interface research by advocating that individuals may “transfer” or reallocate their resources across the work and family domains. They labeled this phenomenon as work-family reallocation, which was supposedly to be differentiated from the prevailing concepts of either work-family conflict or work-family facilitation.

Drawing from the workplace flexibility and coping literatures, the purpose of this paper is to re-conceptualize the workplace flexibility construct as a coping resource that may help prevent work-interferes-with-family (WIF) from arising and/or assist employees manage such interference when it has occurred. A measure capturing this re-conceptualized view of flexibility is developed and tested using two samples of dual-income employees with dependent care demands.

In Study 1, the authors use LISERL to develop and test a new multi-dimensional measure of workplace flexibility (n₁=6,659). In Study 2 (n₂=947), the authors use partial least squares, a component-based structural equation modeling technique, to test a model that posits workplace flexibility that helps employees cope with WIF.

This research provides support for the idea that workplace flexibility helps employees cope with WIF by: preventing interference (i.e. negatively moderating the relationship between work hours and WIF), and managing interference that has occurred (i.e. negatively moderating relationship between WIF and perceived stress).

This study highlights the complexity of the relationship between workplace flexibility and work-to-family interference and offers guidelines on how employers and employees can use the workplace flexibility measure developed in this study.

Individuals differ in their levels of self-control. Trait self-control has been found to relate positively to desirable and negatively to undesirable behaviors in contexts like physical health, academic performance, and criminality. The purpose of this study is to examine the relevance of trait self-control in work-settings. The authors distinguished between two types of self-control, stop-control (inhibitory control) and start-control (initiatory control), and tested their differential validity in predicting contextual performance.

In two independent employee samples, stop-control, start-control, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), personal initiative, and proactive coping were measured. Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) was added in Study 2.

Results showed that only start-control was positively related to OCB, personal initiative, and proactive coping. Both stop-control and start-control were negatively related to CWB.

Findings support the validity of distinguishing between stop-control and start-control, suggesting that self-control theory and models should be refined to incorporate this distinction. Limitations include the correlational design and self-report measures. Although results were similar across two independent studies, future research is needed to test the generalizability of the conclusions in other settings, using non-self-report data.

The distinction between stop-control and start-control may help organizations in selecting staff and assigning tasks.

The present research introduces the distinction between two conceptually different types of self-control (stop-control and start-control), demonstrating their relevance to work-related behavior.

This paper aims offer a benchmark by providing an account of women's experiences with domestic violence in Bangladesh and develops illustrations on coping with abuse.

A case study design was adopted, applying an emic perspective in employing a qualitative research approach to explore and describe women's experiences with and perceptions about domestic violence and their ways of coping in Sherpur District, Bangladesh. In total 25 recently married women participants were purposively sampled by snowballing. In-depth interview data facilitated a latent thematic content analysis.

The findings indicate that women adopt a range of responses to domestic violence. Two key aspects of coping surfaced in the narratives: (1) emotion-driven and (2) problem-driven approaches to abusive situations. Findings point to a range of research issues that require further study such as domestic violence and taboo; somatization; structural gender inequalities; male perpetrators; family dynamics and the intersections of these issues and contexts.

A more proactive way of coping resulted in resilience amidst an abusive environment, whereas passive ways of coping led to a life in distress. It is important however, to understand ways of coping as a continuum rather than a dichotomy.