Styles of Coping with Stress as a Factor Influencing Professional Burnout among Professional Officers of the Polish Army in the Context of Their Age

Abstract

The subject of this article is the issue of coping with stress in the context of the level of professional burnout among professional soldiers at the officer rank and the identification of the relationship between occupational burnout and the preferences of the style of coping with stress and the age of the respondents. The study aims to answer the following questions: how does occupational burnout (its individual dimensions according to the concept underlying the construction of a research tool) depend on the style of coping with stress, and whether and how the level of occupational burnout changes depending on the age of soldiers? The study consists of two parts: a theoretical one, in which the issues are presented in relation to the literature on the subject, and an empirical section, presenting the results of research in which 200 soldiers of the Polish Army with the officer rank participated. The research was carried out using questionnaires that met the requirements of psychometric correctness (Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations—CISS and Link Burnout Questionnaire—LBQ). As a result of the research, it turned out that the level of occupational burnout depends on the choice of the style of coping with stress (a higher level of burnout is favored by the preference for an emotional coping strategy), while the style of coping with stress and the level of occupational burnout among professional soldiers with the rank of officer changes with age. The presented research, mainly due to the specifics of the research group, was not undertaken and described in the literature on the subject.