Emotional maturity and ways of coping among job applicants at the time of selection

An emotionally mature behavior is characterized by taking responsibility of one’s emotions for flexible adaptations to a given situation in dynamic environment and not blaming others for causing them. Emotional maturity of job applicants at the time of selection is reflected in task, contextual and counter- productive performances. The emotional maturity is a function of coping especially when job applicants compete themselves to perform in time bound tasks and engage in a taxing situation. Coping is defined as the cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the individual. The sample of 100 job applicants were administered the Emotional Maturity Scale and Ways of Coping Questionnaire after completion of their personality tests for the job. Among eight ways of coping, only escape-avoidance way of coping was found significant (F=3.09; p<0.05) between emotionally mature and immature job applicants. Escape-avoidance describes wishful thinking and behavioral efforts to escape or avoid the problem. It was also found that escape-avoidance way of coping was positively significantly correlated with emotional unstability, emotional regression, social maladjustment, personality disintegration and overall emotional maturity. The job applicants tend to become wishful in utilizing their intelligence to cope with practical and independent solutions to problems of varying complexities. The study concluded that escape-avoidance way of coping (wishful thinking) is the decisive coping to differentiate between the emotionally mature and immature job applicant.