Coping with Stress Through Social Support

ABSTRACT

Contemporary social work practice in business and industrial settings offer social workers not just broad potential but also endless choices about how to focus its resources. Many Employee Assistance Programs have adopted a “specific problem” approach, which encourages interventions targeted toward individual rather than environmental change. This article operationalizes the ecological perspective and proposes a stress-social support-coping paradigm that closely represents the mission of the profession and its person-in-environment focus. Under the economic realities of managed care environment, social workers and other health/human service professionals, in addition to providing social support directly to employees, will be expected to intervene indirectly by decreasing the Stress.