On the importance of the objective environment in stress and attribution theory. Counterpoint to Perrewé and Zellars

Perrewe and Zellars (this issue) present a highly ambitious and interesting paper. They argue forcefully that Lazarus' stress theory can be extended by incorporating causal attribution theory and, thereby, they suggest to develop a more adequate theory of emotion and coping in the workplace. Having been involved in making emotion research useful to work psychology (Pekrun and Frese, 1992; Temme and Zapf, 1997) we sympathize with their emphasis on emotion. We think highly of the speculation that guilt, shame, anger, and frustration are a result of primary appraisal of stress and causal attributions. Since this answer is supposed to be a `counterpoint', and a short one at that, we would like to concentrate on two issues that we disagree with. First, the role of causal attribution theory. Second, the issue of objective stressors versus relying on individual appraisals. Causal attribution research is without a doubt important for emotional processing (Ortony, Clore and Collins, 1988; Pekrun and Frese, 1992). However, there is one important ®nding that has persuaded us to be a bit more cautious about using causal attribution as a mediator in the stress±emotion relationship: Diener and Dweck (1978) found that helpless children were more likely to engage in an attribution process after failure. In contrast, mastery oriented children were less interested in attributions than in being action oriented and getting the problem solved. In the words of Diener and Dweck (1978, p. 461): `Individuals have been considered to di€er only in the particular attribution they make. The present research, however, suggests that . . . the very occurrence of attribution may be a critical individual di€erence.' The second issue is even more important. Perrewe and Zellars (this issue) have to receive credit for being very explicit in their statements on the importance of the cognitive world instead of the world `out there': `Research suggests that the existence of stress may be less important to an individual's well-being than how the individual appraises and copes with stress' (p. 739). `Although the examination of the objective work stressors may be useful to broadly predict employee strain, the focus is entirely too limiting. In order to truly understand the components of the stress process, the primary focus should be on how individuals interpret objective conditions rather than simply relating stressors to strains,' (p. 740). It is this part of the paper, that we want