The Effects of Work Characteristics, Supervision, and Cultural Competence on Nurses’ Burnout

Abstract

This study examines the effects of work characteristics, superior supervision, and cultural competence on nurses’ burnout. Controlling the effects of work characteristics and supervision, this study focuses on the effects of cultural competence influencing nurses’ burnout. Participants in the study are nurses who are working at six small- and medium-size hospitals under 400 beds, which multicultural patients usually use, located in Seoul and Gyeonggi-do. The data were collected by the measure of cultural competence developed in Korea, and the standardized measures of burnout, workload, role ambiguity, and superior supervision. The statistical analyses include descriptive statistics of respondents’ general characteristics, correlation analysis of relationships between variables, and hierarchical regression analysis of the effects of precedent variables on work burnout. The result of hierarchical regression shows that role ambiguity, subcategory of work characteristics, is positively related to burnout, and that supervision has no impact on burnout. In addition, it indicates that cultural competence (cultural knowledge and skill, cultural awareness, cultural attitude) is a statistically significant variable predicting burnout, and that the effect of cultural attitude is the largest among subcategories of cultural competence. The significance of this study is that it lays the foundation for nurses’ cultural competence by examining the effects of nurses’ cultural competence on burnout. Since work-related competence is not a choice but a must, more diverse education should be provided to improve nurses’ cultural competence for multicultural patients.