Impact of nurses' emotional labour on job stress and emotional exhaustion amid COVID-19: The role of instrumental support and coaching leadership as moderators.

Abstract

AimThis study examines Pakistan nurses’ emotional labor and stress in healthcare emergencies on their emotional exhaustion and availability of support at organizational and managerial levels to alleviate the effects.BackgroundAs COVID‐19 pandemic has been declared a global outbreak and many countries have enacted medical emergencies, this has increased job demands and expected desired emotional expressions from frontline workers. Such high levels of job demand contribute to various stress reactions among employees.MethodologyAuthors applied a longitudinal design, using an experimental approach, to collect data from 319 nurses serving in 107 government hospitals in Pakistan. The authors surveyed nurses at two‐time points with the interval of 3 months by using an online questionnaire tool. At one time, they asked nurses to report on emotional labor, stress, and exhaustion. In the second phase, after providing supports (during interval phase) at different levels, the authors repeated the same scales from same participants in addition to instrumental support and coaching leadership. Data were processed using SPSS‐Amos for elementary analysis and Process‐macro for robustness and hypotheses testing.ResultsAuthors find that job stress fully mediates relationship between surface acting and emotional exhaustion in controlled phase and partially mediates in intervention phase. Furthermore, in intervention phase, authors find that instrumental support moderates and alleviate positive effects of emotional labor on job stress, and coaching leadership moderates and lessens positive effects of job stress on emotional exhaustion.ConclusionThis research concludes that healthcare organizations can alleviate emotional exhaustion caused by emotional labor and job stress amid emergencies by providing support at different levels; organizational and managerial. However, the effectiveness of these supports depends on high to low levels.Implications for Nursing ManagementThis study demonstrates that to handle and support emotional labor and job stress to avoid emotional exhaustion in healthcare emergencies, organizational supports matter. Support at organizational level can include instrumental support. At managerial level, holding a coaching leadership style can foster external facets of management while uplifting the internal support qualities of confidence and self‐awareness that improve the individuals’ ability to lead; work with paradox and uncertainty.