Role of Burnout in the Relationship between Job Demands and Job Outcomes among Indian Nurses

Abstract

Burnout is a severe psychological strain that occurs in response to prolonged exposure to stress at work and has adverse individual and organizational consequences. It has reached a critical stage among today's workforce with a high occurrence among human service professionals. Although avid studies on burnout have been made worldwide, the same among the nursing profession still needs more attention. The goals of this study are to understand how various nursing specific job demands have impact on nurses� burnout and to see if burnout has a role in their job commitment and intentions to turnover. Through a structured questionnaire, data were collected from 862 nurses working in 24 private and public hospitals across six cities in India. Descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analyses, path analyses, and mediator analyses tested the hypotheses. The results reveal the following: Workplace demands such as role conflict, role ambiguity, work load, work-home conflict, shift work attitudes, job complexity, physical environment, and organizational politics are positively associated with emotional exhaustion. While role ambiguity, organizational politics, and job complexity are important predictors of depersonalization, role ambiguity and organizational politics have lowered personal accomplishment. While perception of organizational politics is found to be the most important predictor of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, role ambiguity is the most important predictor of reduced personal accomplishment. While emotional exhaustion and reduced personal accomplishment are responsible for decreased commitment, emotional exhaustion and depersonalization initiate the intentions to turnover. Finding of the study provided empirical evidence that tri-components of burnout mediate the relationships between job demand and outcome variables. Emotional exhaustion is the most important mediator between job demand and outcome variables. In the context of the nursing profession, the above-mentioned job demands can be minimized. Also, early screening for burnout components can help in mitigating their adverse impacts on commitment and turnover of nurses through targeted strategies.

Theoretical Perspective of Job Demands Correlates among Nurses: Systematic Literature Review

“…Kar and Suar [35] asserted that Job demands reflects role conflict, role ambiguity, workload, work-home conflict, shift work attitude, patient care demand, perception of organizational politics, job complexity, and physical environment. See the summary in Table 2.…”

The Impact of Employee's Perceptions of Organizational Politics and Burnout: Role of Psychological Need Satisfaction and Psychological Capital

“…public sector, hospital, university, sports team) which were needed additional researches to generalize [21]. This study is investigated in the service and manufacturing company.…”

The Role of Training, Democratization, and Self-Actualization in Addressing Employee Burnout

“…Both satisfaction and dissatisfaction represent a relationship between what one wants from a job and what one perceives to be getting from the job (Wang et al, 2014). If they feel that the organization is unable to meet their expectations, employees feel less satisfied and accordingly are more inclined to leave the organization (Kar & Suar, 2014). Job burnout has been then a serious problem along various workforces in modern societies (Chen, Wu, & Wei, 2012).…”

“…Complexity of a job such as task difficulty, confusion, or rapid decision making can lead to occupational stress (Kar & Suar, 2014). Developmental tasks put employees into risks and uncertainties, which will increase their feelings of frustration, anxiety or fear about performance failure (Dong, Seo, & Bartol, 2014).…”

“…Employees' stress and burnout are generally recognized to have a negative effect on both employee health and organizational performance (Hollet-Haudebert, Mulki, & Fournier, 2011;Kar & Suar, 2014). Burnout has reached a critical stage among today's workforce because of workplace demands such as role conflict, role ambiguity, work load, work-home conflict, shift work attitudes, job complexity, physical environment, and organizational politics, all of which are positively associated with emotional exhaustion (Kar & Suar, 2014).…”