Correlation Study of the Relationship Between Individual Resilience, Hope, Stress and Humour

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Method
Material
Procedure
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
Reference List

Introduction

Individual dynamism is a critical phenomenon within an organization. It is crucial to adjust appropriately to the challenging situations that might engulf an organization. This is advisable to ensure that the attitude, approach, and performance of individuals remain apposite and competitive within the organization.

Precisely, the matter considers the aspects of resilience at an individual’s level. Nonetheless, the fact is also necessary and applicable at a group or organizational level. Individuals, factions, and corporations should be resilient enough in order to cope with the challenging macro-environmental situations (Miner, 2007).

This research explores resilience at an individual level in order to understand how various people will react to differing conditions and how easy they can cope with the challenging situations at workplace and generally in life. The research considers the aspects of organizational behaviour, which studies individualized characters of people and their effects within organizations.

The study would help organizations identify and deal with any gaps which may instil unproductiveness within their workforce hence improving normal operation practices. It would at the same time assist in the development and maintenance of strategies dealing with stress at workplace (Light, 2005).

Evidently, an individual requires aspects of self-understanding in order to formulate how they can adjust to the changing environments with precision, appropriateness, and the desired relevancy. This will help in self-actualization, satisfaction, and creativity to avoid the looming life challenges that might affect an individual, group, or an organization with stringent adversities in the realms of performance.

As proved by the study, individuals react differently to varied situations, thus indicating the differing levels of resilience witnessed among individuals (Phillips & Gully, 2012). These critical variables are considerable at individual levels and effectual at organizational scales. The success of an individual depends on how flexible he or she is to varying situations.

Another importance of this study is evident since it indicates how people are able to overcome obstacles and challenging situations, which in turn influence the aspects of performance, job satisfaction, and well being. These aspects are applicable at individual levels, which is the main concern of this research, as indicated earlier.

Concurrently, the information from this study can help an organization in understanding its employees better hence knowing and prospecting how employees react to any challenging macro-environmental situation (Light, 2005). This happens for the good of the concerned organization.

Firms can use such information to educate their employees further, train them on various aspects, and prepare them for the overall organizational resilience. Notably, the success of an organization depends on the resiliency of its employees.

Theoretically, self-resilience relates perfectly with the aspects of hope, adaptive humour, stress, and other characters determined at an individual’s level. It is evident that the flexibility of an individual to differing situations will determine how he or she will adjust to certain situations (Hopper, 2010).

This will consequently determine whether the concerned person will be stressed or not. Stressing situations are challenging and require the victims to develop appropriate measures that will help in alleviating such conditions.

Precisely, self-resilience to a varying situation can prevent the aspects of stress and other related atrocities. An individual’s ability to adjust to a particular situation is dependent on their flexibility (Abel, 2002, 365-381). Activation theory describes humour as a dependable tool which could be used in stress situations to produce positive mood and at the same time could be used in reducing negative perceptions (Svebak and Martin, 1997).

From the past studies, people have always reacted differently to different situations indicating the variability desired in this research. This has been a subject of how resilient and receptive one is to varying situations.

It is hypothetical from the executed study that people have varied mechanisms to help them cope with different situations, as indicated earlier. Some people use coping humour to adjust their resilience and adapt to the concerned situations (Hiriyappa, 2009). This indicates a positive correlation amid the mentioned variables.

The ability to adjust to various situations is important at an individual level; however, the revealed provisions are subjective to the previously mentioned flexibility. This is a subject of study and demands appropriate respondents to elucidate the matter (Beer et al., 2009).

Hypothetically, it is arguable that people who easily cope up with challenging situations have shown varied tactics while their performances have never been affected remarkably. This indicates the aspects of resiliency, which require investigations to know whether it contributes to the well-being of individual employees even when the situation is awry.

According to Miner 2007, resilience is critical for survival since an individual’s success depends on their flexibility in various situations. Zeller et al. 2011, advances the issue on a theoretical and empirical study on individual and organizations hence revealing several emerging areas of interest in the academic and practical fields.

From these findings, it is possible to formulate a hypothesis thus; Hypothesis 1: That there is a massive correlation between well-being, performance, job satisfaction, and organizational progress to the resilience of individual worker/employees with regard to different environmental situations.

Transactional stress theory asserts that the amount of stress experienced is at times directly proportional to the cause of stress or rather stressor (Seligman, 2011, pp 100-106).

However, individuals react differently to varied situations, thus indicating the differing levels of resilience witnessed with respect to gender, leading to formulation of the second hypothesis. Hypothesis 2: Males are more likely to respond to stressful situations with humour than their female counterparts.

Ability to scrutinize, understand, and adjust to varying environmental situations is the core of this research. According to the methodology applied, people or respondents have demonstrated varied implications in their endeavours, a fact that is subjective to the resiliency of an individual (Griffin & Moorehead, 2012).

This study is helpful in understanding various individuals and the disparities that occur amidst people. Additionally, it will be able to unveil the remedial approaches that most people assume in order to cope with the demanding and challenging situations within an organization.

Method

The available data for the Research Report came from 182 participants who were studying Organisational Behaviour from both the Campbell town and Paramatta campuses of the University of Western Sydney. There were 86 males (47.3%) and 96 females (52.7%).

Material

The dimensions used in the questionnaire were adapted from the following scales: the Global Measure of Perceived Stress, the Coping Humour Scale from the Multidimensional Sense of Humour scale, State Hope Scale and Brief Resilience Scale. Students were asked to respond to a four-part questionnaire.

The first part was about past feelings and thoughts for the Global Measure of Perceived Stress with a five-point Likert scale represented by 1=Never and 5= Very often. There were 14 items to give a total score.

The second part was based on the coping Humour Scale from the Multidimensional Sense of Humour Scale with a five-point Likert Scale represented as 1=Not at all true and 5= Completely true. There were 5 items to give a total score.

The third part was based on the State Hope Scale and was a question about how individuals felt about themselves at the moment of experiment with an eight-point Likert scale represented as 1= Definitely False and 8= Definitely True. There were 6 items to give a total score.

The fourth and final section was a question of how respondents responded to stressful situations in the course of the year or how they would have if they had not experienced any stressful situations so far. It was based on the Brief Resilience Scale with a five-point Likert Scale represented as 1=Not at all true and 5= True all time. There were 10 items to give a total score.

Procedure

Participation was voluntary and the students tallied their own scores and tabulated their results in the provided spreadsheet. The purpose was explained before the students began. However, it would be good to have enough data to enable a more informed study.

Results

The results were recorded and tabulated as indicated in table 1 and 2 below.

Table 1; Descriptive statistics and t-tests on individual responses to stress, humour, hope and resilience

First hypothesis indicating that there is a massive correlation between well-being, performance, job satisfaction, and organisational progress to the resilience of individuals with regard to different environmental situations is well supported. This shows that an individual’s environment plays an important role it their levels of productivity. This is because resilience and stress are negatively correlated (Zellars et al., 2011).

Hence, workers working under less or no stressing circumstances are generally more productive. The second hypothesis is also supported through the correlation between variables indicating that men are more likely to respond with humour. This is indicated by the standard deviation for humour and resilience, which is higher for male compared to female.

Close examination reveals that females scored higher than males on stress. This shows that females are more susceptible to stress than their male counterparts. The standard deviation was highest for females in hope and stress while in men it was highest in humour and resilience. This reveals that females hold a significantly higher chance of being stressed out while men are more likely to use humour to handle stressful situations.

In table 2 there was a significant positive correlation between resilience and coping humour (.32, p<.001), indicating that where resilience was higher, more people responded to stressful situations with humour.

There was a significant positive correlation between resilience and hope, indicating that the more hopeful someone is the more resilient they are. There was negative correlation between resilience (-.34, p>.01) and stress indicating that the more stressed someone is the less resilient they become.

Discussion

The second hypothesis was not sufficiently supported. The correlation between the variables revealed that men respond with humour more and could be one of the reasons why they have less stress levels than the females. However, in most situations, females are found to be more hopeful while men are more resilient.

This supports widely accepted view that men have higher abilities to cope with adversity compared to females. The finding supports the assumption on the role of humour and hope in the process of dealing with stress.

For hypothesis 1, there was a significant correlation between well-being, performance, job satisfaction, organisational progress and the resilience of individuals. This reveals that individual resilience is one of the crucial factors which could be used in determining one’s progress and performance level within organizations.

The results at the same time revealed that there is a negative correlation between resilience and stress. This means that the more resilient somebody is, the less stressed he/she becomes hence high level of productivity realised (Seligman, 2011, pp 100-106).

There was also significant positive correlation between resilience and level of hope amongst individuals meaning that hope thrives best where there is sense of motivation based on interactive environment.

Theory confirms that individuals with positive and quick response to humour have the capability of paying less attention to potential stress events hence making them have less negative outcomes from any stressful situation. This provides support to the second hypothesis, since individuals with high sense of humour have less mood disturbance.

Despite these, some studies do not reflect general findings in this study, especially on the ground that there is little evidence in support of the generally supported view that humour diminishes effects of stress on physical health (Abel, 2002, 365-381).

Results indicated no significant differences between males and females on the measures used, hence revealing that the level of manipulation effect was weak and not as formidable as expected.

One limitation was that the research did not involve the use of control group participants which could have been used to elaborate on the fact that individuals can at times respond to their environment based on their habits or personal needs.

Conclusion

The study found that there was a significant positive correlation between resilience and coping humour, indicating that the more people used humour as a coping mechanism, the higher their resilience. There was a significant positive correlation between resilience and hope and there was negative correlation between resilience and stress.

Reference List

Abel, M. H 2002, Humour, Stress, and coping strategies, Humour, vol15 no. 4, pp 365-381

Griffin, R. & Moorehead, G 2012, Organizational behaviour: managing people and organizations, Cengage Learning, Ohio,

Hiriyappa, B 2009, Organizational behaviour, New Age International Publishers, New Delhi

Hopper, E 2010, Trauma and Organizations, Karnac Books, New York

Light, P 2005, The four pillars of high performance: how robust organizations achieve extraordinary results, McGraw Hill, New York,

Miner, J 2007, From theory to practice, Armonk, New York

Seligman, M. E. P 2011, Building resilience, Harvard Business Review, vol 89 no. 4, pp 100-106

Svebak, S. & Martin, R. A 1997, Humour as a form of coping. In Svebak, S. and Apter,

M. J. (Eds.) Stress and Health: A Reversal Theory Perspective (pp. 173-184), Taylor & Francis publishers

Zellars, K. L., Justice, L. & Beck, T. E 2011, Resilience: new paths for building and Sustaining individual and organizational capacity, Research in occupational stress and well being, vol 9, pp 1-37

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