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Trans. Planning Journal
| Title | Job Stress and Coping Strategies of Taiwan’s Airport Security Guards |
|---|---|
| Author | Ying-Chun Wang |
| Summary | After the Twin Towers in New York, U. S., were crashed by the planes hijacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001, the importance of airport security guards has been brought into focus. Every country in the world has started stepping up its security procedures and setting up more stringent management systems to rigorously execute its anti-terrorist acts, while security guards bear very heavy responsibilities, including long working time, force and intervention. Their work is becoming a high-stress job. In studies on the working stress concerning mass-transportation personnel, military officers and policemen, the focus has been on how working stress affects the body and the mind. Most researchers have adopted clinical physiology or personal traits as their research direction, while very few have given importance to culture. As a result, the phenomena and characteristics of the Chinese people cannot be completely reflected without taking into account national characters and cultural features. In understanding the consciousness of airport security guards over stress and response, if the mediating effects of culture can be taken into consideration, we may then provide more concrete suggestions as to how the working group of a given culture responds to and eases its stress. Therefore, this research is aimed to understand the airport security guard’s perceptivity of and approach to working stress, as well as the influences of collectivism and individualism stress and response. It adopts the fundamental concepts of the local cultural system and unfolds how the security personnel of Taiwan’s airport perceive and respond to pressure. The study shows that the pressure of airport security guards while on duty mainly comes from work interaction, facilities and rule regulation, work burden, work autonomy, and organization atmosphere. These results are different from those obtained from the studies about the police. Airport security guards will take a few steps, such as rational management, social support, self-accommodation, when facing pressure. Under the influence of Chinese cultural aspects, the pressure resulted from work autonomy significantly appears to be highly related to social support and self-accommodation. |
| Vol. | 35 |
| No. | 1 |
| Page | 29 |
| Year | 2006 |
| Month | 3 |
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