Hardy as Nails

The vice president of human resources at an Orange County corporation had organized a training program to teach employees skills for coping with a round of layoffs about to hit the company.

Then, to his surprise, the vice president learned that his name was on the list of those to be let go.

This story is related by Salvatore Maddi, a UC Irvine psychologist who led the training session that the vice president and his co-workers attended several years ago.

As Maddi tells it, the VP--rather than being devastated by the loss of his job--used his newly learned coping skills to turn the setback into a positive step.

“He recognized that there were forces beyond his control. He didn’t go away mad or see himself as a loser,” Maddi said. “He was able to make a decisive action plan which involved him starting his own consulting business.” His first client, Maddi said, was his former employer.

In the jargon of Maddi and other researchers in the field, the Orange County executive demonstrated “hardiness” skills. That is, he adopted attitudes that not only helped him deal with a potentially catastrophic situation but also that would help lead him to success in his personal and professional lives.

According to other experts in the field, the concept of “hardiness” was coined by Maddi and Suzanne Oullette, now a psychologist at City University of New York, in a major study of 450 managers of Illinois Bell in the years before the 1984 breakup of AT&T; Corp.

The two researchers wanted to study why some people seem to cope with stressful circumstances better than others. Are there personality attributes that help people cope better, and, if so, what are they?

In the Illinois Bell study, “we found that two-thirds of the managers fell apart in terms of conduct, health and performance” in the years before AT&T;’s divestiture of its former Bell operating companies, “but the other third thrived and rose to the top of the heap.”

Their conclusion about the reasons some survived and others didn’t has formed the foundation of “hardiness” research ever since.

As Maddi and Oullette concluded, hardiness involves a “set of beliefs about oneself, the world and the interaction between the two.”

This is demonstrated in the attitudes of people who have a strong sense of commitment, control and challenge about events in their lives, according to Maddi.

Maddi heads the Hardiness Institute, a stress-management training organization in Newport Beach that has worked with corporations, universities and other organizations around the country to teach people how to manage stress. The program consists of training in social skills, relaxation, nutrition and exercise.

Priscilla O’Connor, a professor of nursing at the College of New Jersey in Trenton, has studied hardiness in nurses and children. She is trying to develop a program for teaching stress-management skills to young children.

She uses the example of a child who isn’t chosen for the softball or baseball team. Instead of sulking and becoming self-critical about this slight, “we want them to ask why something happens.”

One solution, O’Connor said, might be to advise the child to find an activity other than baseball at which he or she excels. O’Connor and other researchers believe these skills can be taught to adults as well as to children.

That’s what Keith Jensen is trying to do at Utah Valley State College in Orem. Last year, the director of student support services at the 17,000-student college began a hardiness-training program for students considered to be at risk of performing poorly or of dropping out of school altogether.

Although Jensen says it’s too early to measure the program’s success with hard statistics, so far the anecdotal evidence is persuasive.

Of the 35 students who participated in the 15-week program last year, none dropped out of school. And students who responded to a survey about the program reported that they found the training highly useful both academically and in their personal lives.

How much stress management can actually be taught--and how much is a trait developed early in life--is still a matter of controversy among researchers.

Maddi says his own interest in the subject developed during the 1970s.

“I thought the message that came out of the ‘70s was entirely wrong: that you should avoid stress because it will kill you.” Instead, Maddi felt that stress is inevitable, and learning how to deal with it more effectively is a better approach for most people.

Over the last two decades, studies have looked at the relationship of hardiness to the success of officer recruits in the Israeli military and the link between worker hardiness and the success of a small printing company.

Maddi has even studied the connection between personality and the performance of basketball players. One finding: There was no relationship between players’ personal hardiness and their free-throw shooting percentage. Listen up, Shaquille O’Neal.