Strengthening professional efficacy due to sustainable development of social and individual competences-Empirical research study among Polish and Slovak employees of the aviation sector

Abstract

Nowadays, taking into account the multidimensionality of the external environment and necessity of the sustainable development of human resources, organizations are obliged to take more care of the psychological resources of their employees, e.g., positive orientation, ego resilience, and emotional stability. Such resources affect how we cope with stress and a sense of threat. The authors of this paper focus on people employed in the aviation sector, who work in the hard-to-cope environment of full automation, demanding working conditions and numerous stressors. The presented study fills a gap in the research on the psychological characteristics of the aviation sector. Moreover, a sense of stress/threat is described in the context of the high specificity of employees representing the 4.0 sector. Therefore, it provides additional insights into the psychological functioning of the employees in the aviation sector. The results show that both positive orientation and ego resilience might be seen as protective factors against a sense of threat and stress, while a type D personality is a risk factor of a higher level of those psychological states. The novelty of the presented research concerns a better understanding of the sense of stress/threat experienced by the employees in this sector, as well as verifying the relationships between psychological variables described in the literature as personal resources.