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How IT project managers cope with stress

Published: 20 May 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This research examines the level of stress experienced by IT project managers and determines the types of coping strategies used to handle their stress. Sixty-four South African IT project managers completed an online questionnaire. The findings indicate that IT project managers are highly stressed and tend to utilize maladaptive coping strategies more as their stress levels increase. These strategies included self-distraction, venting, self-blame, positive reframing, behavioral disengagement, substance use and denial. This contradicts prior research where the coping strategy was emotional support. In addition, the more experienced the IT project managers were, the higher their levels of stress. These findings could assist project managers to better understand the effects of stress on their productivity and to consider more appropriate coping strategies to assist them to reduce their stress.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGMIS-CPR '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Special Interest Group on Management Information System's 48th annual conference on Computer personnel research on Computer personnel research
May 2010
190 pages
ISBN:9781450300049
DOI:10.1145/1796900
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 20 May 2010

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Author Tags

  1. IT project manager
  2. adaptive coping
  3. coping strategies
  4. maladaptive coping
  5. project manager stress
  6. south africa
  7. stress

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