Emotional Intelligence Buffers the Effects of Negative Emotions on Job Burnout in Nursing.

Dorota Daniela Szczygiel,Moïra Mikolajczak

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02649

Abstract

The study was designed to examine whether trait emotional intelligence would moderate the impact of negative emotions at work on job burnout. A total of 188 female nurses participated in this study and completed measures of trait affectivity, emotional intelligence, anger and sadness at work, and burnout. The results revealed significant and positive relationships between both types of negative emotions and burnout above and beyond demographics and the nurses’ trait affectivity. Importantly, the study demonstrated that trait emotional intelligence buffers the effects of negative emotions on burnout. Specifically, anger- and sadness-related emotions predicted greater burnout among nurses with low trait emotional intelligence but not among nurses with high trait emotional intelligence. These results suggest that emotional intelligence training could be implemented to prevent the adverse effect of negative emotions felt at work on job burnout.

Highlights

Job burnout is a specific disorder resulting from prolonged exposure to high job demands in the absence of enough resources to compensate for their effects (Demerouti et al, 2000; Maslach et al, 2001; Bakker et al, 2004, 2014; Hu et al, 2017)
Given the importance of this issue, the current study aims to extend previous findings in four ways: first, by re-examining the association between negative emotions (NE) and burnout using daily reports on emotions, collected over five consecutive days; second, by examining whether specific NE, such as sadnessrelated and anger-related emotions uniquely contribute to nurses’ burnout; third, by investigating whether sadness- and angerrelated emotions contribute to burnout beyond the respondents’ trait positive and negative affectivity; and, fourth, because we believe that attention should be paid to the factors that may alleviate the adverse effect of NE on job burnout, we aimed to examine whether the strength of the association between NE and burnout varies according to each nurse’s emotional intelligence (EI)
The variables were entered into the regression model as follows: sociodemographic characteristics and both negative affectivity (NA) and PA were entered in the first step as control variables

Summary

Introduction

Job burnout is a specific disorder resulting from prolonged exposure to high job demands in the absence of enough resources to compensate for their effects (Demerouti et al, 2000; Maslach et al, 2001; Bakker et al, 2004, 2014; Hu et al, 2017). Burnout has been shown to have a deleterious impact on nurses, as it affects their health (e.g., Shimizu et al, 2005; Jaworek et al, 2010; Duan-Porter et al, 2018). It affects healthcare organizations, by increasing absenteeism (Iverson et al, 1998), job dissatisfaction (Wolpin et al, 1991) and intention to leave the profession (Leiter and Maslach, 2009; Heinen et al, 2013). Burnout affects patient safety: higher rates of burnout among healthcare professionals are associated with lower quality of care (Poghosyan et al, 2010), increased frequency of neglectful behaviors toward patients (Reader and Gillespie, 2013) and increased frequency of adverse patient events, such as nosocomial infections (Cimiotti et al, 2012) and medication errors (Tsiga et al, 2017)

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Conclusion