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Key words
Job stress, perceived social support, psychological capital, occupational burnout, structural equation modeling
Abstract
Purpose: To determine the structural relationships among nurses' occupational burnout, job stress, psychological capital, and perceived support from society.
Design: A cross-sectional design was performed to collect data from 766 registered nurses in three general tertiary Class A hospitals from March to August 2018.
Methods: Structural equation modeling was performed to examine the proposed model.
Findings: The research data supported the proposed model. Psychological capital, job stress, and perceived social support significantly influenced occupational burnout. Job stress indirectly influenced burnout through perceived social support and psychological capital. The influencing factors accounted for 49% of the variance in explaining burnout.
Conclusions: The findings identified structural relationships among the four studied variables. This study provides new information regarding the preventive role of perceived social support and psychological capital, which perform the mediating role between job stress and occupational burnout.
Clinical Relevance: Nursing administrators should provide a healthy work environment, effective psychological capital training, and assistance to reduce nurses' occupational burnout.
Occupational burnout (OB) refers to negative feelings related to an individual's reduced personal accomplishment, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization that take place in their workplaces (Maslach & Jackson, 1986). The high prevalence of nursing burnout has occurred globally. For example, Aiken et al. (2011) conducted research in nine countries, and it was found that one third to two thirds of nurses experienced a high rate of OB in eight countries, except for Germany, which might be related to the expectation of the whole society that nursing staff should have both excellent nursing skills and high personal morality. However, nurses experience high workloads, requirements, and risks, which then result in high OB (Li, Chang, Hao, & Yang, 2019). Additionally, researchers have noted that the level of OB in the nursing population is higher than among other healthcare providers (Gomez-Urquiza et al., 2017). This may be related to the severe shortage of nursing staff. The World Health Organization (2020) has reported that the number of nurses' vacancies worldwide was 5.9 million in 2018. Moreover, with the outbreak of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), more nurses are required to take care of hospitalized patients. Since nurses have the closest and longest time contact with patients among all...