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Production/operations managers want to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their subordinates. If an ineffective subordinate cannot be terminated the operations manager must devise a means of coping with this individual. A mail questionnaire survey of manufacturing firms listed in the 1984 Standard and Poor's Register of Corporations, Directors and Executives and a parallel telephone questionnaire survey were administered to production/operations managers in the USA. One hundred and eighty‐four usable returns, representing 82 manufacturing organisations, were received. Results show that coping strategies used by production/operations managers vary as a function of the superior's age, level of management and years of experience. Coping strategies change over time. Recently passive strategies have been used to a greater extent. Previously more active strategies were used. Active strategies for dealing with ineffective subordinates are now gaining favour again.

This chapter uses cognitive psychology to understand how individuals deal with negative emotions using coping strategies. It discusses the coping process and reviews three current debates about cognitive appraisal theory, coping and emotion regulation. The use of coping strategies in tourism, services and business management is presented to understand different stakeholders' responses to negative emotions. The literature discusses various elements (antecedents, coping strategies, coping consequence) for emotion coping process and the chapter summarises a synthesised conceptual framework for emotional coping based on the cognitive appraisal theory. The framework is used to examine coping in the context of COVID-19. The chapter concludes with future research opportunities in this subject area.

Combining the coping theory and social support theory, this study aims to reveal users' coping strategies for mobile fitness app (MFA) engagement and fitness intentions with a rigorous and comprehensive hybrid research approach.

A three-stage hybrid research design was employed in this study. In the first stage, this study utilized structural equation modeling (SEM) to investigate the associations between coping resources and coping outcomes. A post hoc analysis was conducted in the second stage to unveil the reasons behind the insignificant or weak linkages. In the third stage, the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) technique was applied to explore the various configurations of coping resources that lead to the coping outcomes.

The results in the three stages verify and compensate each other. The SEM results confirm the presence of two coping strategies in MFA, highlighting the importance of the intertwining of the strategies, and the post hoc analysis unveils the mediating role of positive affect. Moreover, the fsQCA results reinforce and complement the SEM findings by revealing eight alternative configurations that are sufficient for leading to users' MFA engagement and fitness intention.

This study offers a prominent methodological paradigm by demonstrating the application of multi-analysis in exploring users' coping strategies. In addition, the study also advances the understanding of the complexity of the mechanism that determines users' behavioral decisions by presenting a comprehensive interpretation.

This paper seeks to report selective findings of a wider study to identify the mechanisms that end users employ to overcome their information seeking failure on the web.

Data collection was conducted by semi‐structured and in‐depth interviews. The study adopted a qualitative approach and was carried out based on grounded theory. The biology community at the University of Sheffield was selected as the research population.

Identified coping strategies are divided into active and passive categories. Active strategies such as revising and help‐seeking require further actions to obtain more satisfactory results. In contrast, passive strategies entail less action to modify the situation and mainly relate to accepting the existing circumstances. Web users prioritise their coping strategies according to the importance of the search topic and their determination to fulfil the search successfully. They develop coping strategies through training courses, using trial and error, knowledge sharing and employing pre‐web coping strategies.

This study was limited to a small group of web users in academia that cannot be easily considered as an acceptable representative of the heterogeneous population of web users. Moreover, the collected data was based on web users' perception of their search failure rather than an objective measure of it.

Most studies in this area are concerned with users' information seeking behaviour and focus on how people find what they want. However, this paper addresses an aspect of this process that has received little attention up to now. The paper explores users' reaction to, and conceptualisation of, information seeking failure and their coping strategies to overcome the failure in web searching. The findings provide us with a better understanding of users' information seeking behaviour on the web.

Given the reality that working mothers experience difficulties in achieving work-family balance because of the social restrictions that arise from parenting combined with career goals, this paper aims to explore the various coping strategies that are used by working mothers in the cities of London (Great Britain) and Lagos (Nigeria).

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 72 mothers who worked in banks in London (Great Britain) and Lagos (Nigeria). Thematic analysis and investigator triangulation are used.

The findings reveal various coping strategies used by working mothers in the cities of Lagos and London. The paper also unearths the efficiency and the shortcomings of the use of au pairs among British working mothers and the similarities and disparities in terms of such use compared to the traditional use of housekeepers in Nigeria.

This paper contributes to the existing work–family balance literature by exploring the coping strategies of working mothers because of sociocultural and institutional differences in Great Britain and Nigeria.

The purpose of this paper is to examine coping strategies, social support, and psychological distress for comparable samples of unemployed (n=389) and re-employed (n=270) individuals. The authors hypothesized that problem-focused coping and higher levels of social support would be associated with lower levels of psychological distress for unemployed vs re-employed participants.

The cross-sectional design and the convenience sampling method were used in the study.

Although unemployed participants reported poorer coping, higher levels of psychological distress, and lower levels of social support compared to re-employed participants; social support and coping strategies predicted psychological distress. Multiple regression analyses suggest that emotion-focused coping strategies were related to higher levels of psychological distress, whereas social support and problem-focused coping strategies were related to lower levels of psychological distress. Social support accounted for more variance in participants’ psychological distress above and beyond all other variables. Single and unemployed participants of the study used less problem-focused, more emotion-focused coping, and perceived lower social support than married unemployed. Gender and marital status of the unemployed were also significantly associated with psychological distress. In addition, older and less educated unemployed participants perceived less social support and used emotion-focused coping more frequently.

The findings indicated that being female, single, older, and low educated are the potential sociodemographic risk factors for the psychosocial well-being of unemployed people.

The favourable effects of certain coping strategies suggest the potential benefits of interventions to reduce reliance on emotion-focused coping and stimulate more problem-focused strategies in order to enhance psychological well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to explore coping strategies of female business expatriates and to examine how these strategies are associated with the women's international adjustment.

Data were collected through mail surveys to western female business expatriates in Hong Kong regarding their coping strategies and adjustment.

As predicted, the results showed that the female expatriates more often used problem focused than symptom focused coping strategies. Surprisingly, there was no association between problem focused coping strategies and socio‐cultural adjustment. However, as expected, symptom focused coping strategies were negatively related to adjusting in socio‐cultural terms. As presumed, there was no relationship between any of the coping strategies and psychological adjustment.

The special contextual circumstances in Hong Kong could have contributed to the unanticipated findings that there was no association between problem focused coping strategies and any type of adjustment studied. Through cross‐cultural training, female business expatriates could benefit from being informed that applying symptom focused coping strategies may make them less well adjusted to a host location.

Women still represent a relatively untapped source for expatriation and the research on female business expatriates is still inadequate in many respects. An important issue examined by this study is how women cope with the stress of international assignments and how that may affect their international adjustment.

The number of poor and informal urban settlers in the world is rapidly growing, and they are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of a changing climate. Therefore, understanding the nature and sustainability of locally adopted coping and adaptation strategies are key, yet still under-researched areas.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in two poor, flood-prone municipalities in Pikine/Dakar, this paper identifies such coping and adaptation strategies and examines their prospects for maladaptation.

The paper shows that poor urban dwellers are not mere passive spectators of climate change. With the very limited resources they have at their disposal, it is found that local actors respond to perennial flooding with very diverse strategies, which have varying degrees of success and sustainability. A key finding is that local coping and adaptation strategies are mainly maladaptive because they divert risks and impacts in time and space and have detrimental effects on the most vulnerable. Unless there is a broad assimilation of all groups in decision-making processes locally, individual and even collective coping and adaptation strategies may easily put the most vulnerable households at greater risk. The findings reveal that community-based adaptation is not a panacea per se, as it may not, by itself, compensate for the lack of basic services and infrastructure that is forcing the urban poor to cope with disproportionate levels of risk.

The paper, hence, contributes to address a central question in scholarly debates on climate adaptation, vulnerability and disaster risk management: Are local coping strategies a stepping stone towards adaptation or are they on the contrary likely to lead to maladaptation?

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into how consumers cope with confusion caused by overload in information and/or choice. The paper investigates whether consumers who face different degrees of confusion use different coping strategies depending upon their decision‐making styles.

The Dutch mobile phone market is a typical example of a turbulent market, overloaded with information and/or choice, which creates consumer confusion. A survey was conducted among 203 mobile phone users, using valid and reliable multi‐item scales to measure consumer confusion, decision‐making styles and coping strategies. Cluster analysis and Mancova were used to provide insight into the results.

The paper finds that consumers of mobile phones can be characterized by combinations of decision‐making styles and find three clusters based on decision‐making styles: “price conscious and cautious” consumers, “brand‐loyal and quality‐driven” consumers, and “functionalist” consumers. Results show significant main effects of the degree of confusion and the decision‐making styles on the use of coping strategies as well as a significant interaction effect of these two. Higher levels of consumer confusion lead to an increased use of seven coping strategies: downsizing the consideration set; keeping status quo; reduced information search; search deferral; buying what others have bought; disengagement from decision; and decision delegation. “Price conscious and cautious” consumers engage less in downsizing the consideration set than the two other clusters, and are less inclined to keep the status quo as compared to “functionalist” consumers.

Because of the intangible and heterogeneous nature of services, knowledge about coping with confusion due to an overload in information and choice is especially important for service providers in their efforts to build and sustain strong relationships with consumers. Practical implications in terms of different approaches on how to cope with confused consumers are provided.

The paper aims to assess the impact of weather-induced shocks on household food consumption in the rural Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) through the case of Long An province and evaluate the effectiveness of widely used coping strategies in mitigating weather-related shock impacts.

The system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation method is applied to explore information on shock incidence, recovery, and time occurrences. The paper uses a sample of 272 repeated farming households from 5-wave survey data from 2008 to 2016, resulting in 1,360 observations.

The paper confirms the robust negative effect of a natural shock on food consumption. Additionally, using savings proves to be the most potent measure to smooth food consumption. Other favorable coping strategies are “getting assistance from relatives, friends” or “getting assistance from the Government, and non-government organizations (NGOs).” The mitigating effects are also traced in the current analysis.

Using caution when generalizing the results from Long An to the whole VMD is reasonable. The rather limited observations of coping strategies do not allow the authors to analyze any specific strategy.

The proposed approach employs the GMM technique and controls for endogenous coping strategies and thus provides accurate estimates of the effects of weather-related shocks and the mitigation effectiveness in the rural VMD.