Abstract
This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to investigate the status of emotional labor and its related factors among nurses in general hospital settings in Korea. A total of seven electronic databases were comprehensively searched to find relevant cross-sectional studies published up to 28 January 2021. The meta-analysis was performed using Stata version 13.1. In total, 131 studies were included. The population showed a standardized mean difference of 3.38 (95% confidence interval, 3.34 to 3.42) in emotional labor assessed by a 1–5 Likert scale. The level of emotional labor had significant negative correlations with job satisfaction, social support, organizational engagement, coworker support, resilience, and nurses’ work environment, while it had significant positive correlations with emotional labor and burnout, turnover intention, and job stress. Although the methodological quality of the included studies was generally good, 24 of the included studies (18.32%) were evaluated as lacking generalization potential or otherwise as unclear. In conclusion, nurses in general hospital settings in Korea experience mild-to-moderate levels of emotional labor. There is some evidence that the emotional labor of nurses and its detrimental effects can be buffered at both the individual and hospital levels, and future research should focus on developing targeted interventions and evaluating their effectiveness.
Highlights
IntroductionMany studies have reported that burnout, including low personal accomplishment and emotional exhaustion, is common in this population [2], causing nurses’ quality of life and well-being to be threatened [3,4]
As a result of the secondary screening of the full texts, 22 which were not conducted in general hospital settings [28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48], 6 which did not confirm the hospital where the research had been conducted [49,50,51,52,53,54], 4 which did not include the full text [55,56,57,58], 2 which did not use emotional labor [59,60], 3 which used the same data as other journal articles [61,62,63], and 2 studies that did not have cross-section designs [64,65] were excluded
Meta-analyses for outcomes of emotional labor from a 1–7 Likert scale were as follows: total score of emotional labor, surface acting (SMD, 4.66; 95% confidence interval (CI), 4.53 to 4.79), and deep acting
Summary
Many studies have reported that burnout, including low personal accomplishment and emotional exhaustion, is common in this population [2], causing nurses’ quality of life and well-being to be threatened [3,4]. Is the improvement of nurses’ mental health important to enhance their overall health and quality of life [3], and their good mental health is essential for patient safety [5,6] and the efficient use of medical resources, such as Sustainability 2021, 13, 11634. Sustainability 2021, 13, 11634 organizational commitment and productivity [6]. HCWs’ turnover intention, which is known to be related to emotional labor [7], has been connected to significant financial costs and reduced productivity [8]
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