Abstract
Burnout is a severe psychological strain that occurs in response to prolonged exposure to stress at work and has adverse individual and organizational consequences. It has reached a critical stage among today's workforce with a high occurrence among human service professionals. Although avid studies on burnout have been made worldwide, the same among the nursing profession still needs more attention. The goals of this study are to understand how various nursing specific job demands have impact on nurses� burnout and to see if burnout has a role in their job commitment and intentions to turnover. Through a structured questionnaire, data were collected from 862 nurses working in 24 private and public hospitals across six cities in India. Descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analyses, path analyses, and mediator analyses tested the hypotheses. The results reveal the following:
Workplace demands such as role conflict, role ambiguity, work load, work-home conflict, shift work attitudes, job complexity, physical environment, and organizational politics are positively associated with emotional exhaustion. While role ambiguity, organizational politics, and job complexity are important predictors of depersonalization, role ambiguity and organizational politics have lowered personal accomplishment. While perception of organizational politics is found to be the most important predictor of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, role ambiguity is the most important predictor of reduced personal accomplishment. While emotional exhaustion and reduced personal accomplishment are responsible for decreased commitment, emotional exhaustion and depersonalization initiate the intentions to turnover.
Finding of the study provided empirical evidence that tri-components of burnout mediate the relationships between job demand and outcome variables. Emotional exhaustion is the most important mediator between job demand and outcome variables.
In the context of the nursing profession, the above-mentioned job demands can be minimized. Also, early screening for burnout components can help in mitigating their adverse impacts on commitment and turnover of nurses through targeted strategies.