Individual Responses to Job Loss: Perceptions, Reactions, and Coping Behaviors

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Abstract
This article presents a theoretical model that explains how individuals perceive, react to, and cope with job loss. Job loss is seen as a stressful event that evokes perceptual, emotional, and physiological changes. Identified in the model are situational factors and individual difference variables that influence the degree to which individuals will experience job loss as stressful. In addition, the coping strategies used by dismissed employees to deal with job loss, and the impact these coping strategies have on obtaining re-employment, are examined. The relationships among job re-attainment status and a series of attitudinal, physiological, and behavioral outcomes are also explored. Finally, suggestions for future research are outlined and discussed.