Factors influencing emotional labor of clinical nurses in a university hospital

Abstract

Background: Recently, providing good quality nursing care means not only nursing knowledge and skills, but also attitude and emotions toward patients. We want to find out the cause and the level of nurses’ emotional labor when rendering nursing care. Objective: This study was conducted to analyze the effect of individual nurses, organizational and customers’ characteristics on nurses’ emotional labor. Methods: This is a descriptive survey research to identify the level of emotional labor of nurses and the elements affecting it. Results: 1. A-type characteristic refers to a group of nurses who continuously struggle in a short period of time trying to achieve more whereas B-type characteristic has relatively relaxed lifestyle. Nurses of A-type characteristic turned out to go through higher degree of emotional labor than B-type statistically. (t = 3.209, p < 0.005) 2. Korean version of nursing work environment measurement tools was used to identify organizational characteristic. Nurses’ emotional labor was reversely correlated with work environment (=-0.1733, p < 0.05). Nurses’ work environment also showed significant reverse correlation with A-type characteristic (r = 0.2224, p < 0.001) and customer complaining behavior (r = −0.2457, p < 0.0005). 3. Nurses’ emotional labor was significantly correlated with customer complaining behavior (r = 0.2220, p < 0.0001) whereas it was reversely correlated with work environment (r = −0.2457, p < 0.005). Discussion: The significance of this study is in adapting customers’ characteristic as an independent variable for the first time in nursing research in Korea. Conclusion: A-type characteristics and customer complaining behavior were correlated with nurses’ emotional labor. Work environment was not related with nurses’ emotional labor. Individual characteristics of nurses had higher influences on the level of emotional labor than customer complaining behavior.