The Role of Coping Resources in the Relationship Between Mistreatment and Job Burnout: Evidence Across Two Healthcare Settings

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhile research has consistently linked patient aggression to healthcare providers’ job burnout and, in turn, to poor quality of care, much less attention has been paid to exploring the factors that could protect employees from the negative effects of mistreatment. Drawing on the Conservation of Resources theory, the current study investigated the moderating role of social, task-related, and individual resources (supervisor support, job autonomy, and self-efficacy) in the relationship between mistreatment by patients and their relatives and job burnout. A cross-sectional design was used to collect data from two samples of healthcare employees: a sample of 217 nurses working in a general hospital and a sample of 234 healthcare professionals employed at a mental health hospital. Data were collected using self-reported questionnaires and analyzed using hierarchical multiple regression. Mistreatment was found to be a significant predictor of both emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. Supervisor support had a direct negative effect on emotional exhaustion in both samples and a moderating effect on the relationship between mistreatment and depersonalization in Sample 1. Surprisingly, job autonomy exacerbated, rather than weakened, the positive relationship between mistreatment and depersonalization. This finding, which was consistent across two different measures of mistreatment and hospital settings, challenges the widely held assumption concerning the buffering effect of job autonomy and suggests that job autonomy may play a more complicated role in the relationship between job stressors and outcomes than typically assumed.