The relationship of job stress to job satisfaction and the intent of Army Nurse Corps officers to stay in active military service

The United States is facing a tremendous nursing shortage. The nursing workforce is aging, the numbers of individuals enrolling in nursing school has dropped for the sixth consecutive year, and nurses are making career choices outside of nursing. With the recent changes in the military healthcare system (downsizing, restructuring, etc.), increased deployments, increased career choices of individuals, and the current nursing shortage, military hospitals are being subjected to the same pressures as the civilian organizations. The purpose of this study was to obtain information from military nurses concerning (1) their level of job stress; (2) personal characteristics that increase their job stress; (3) their level of job satisfaction; and (4) the relationship between those variables and the nurses' intent to stay in active military service. An adaptation of the General Research Model by Summers and associates was used to guide the study.; The population consisted of Army nurses assigned to fixed facilities in two regions of the United States. A random sample of facilities and nurses was obtained. The research instruments (Gray-Toft & Anderson's Nursing Stress Scale, Stamps' Index of Work Satisfaction, and Price's Intent to Stay Questionnaire as revised by Yoder) were organized, with a demographic data sheet, into scannable packet form and distributed via mail to 250 Army nurses. There was a return rate of 60% with 136 (54%) usable surveys.; The demographic information was analyzed using descriptive statistics and measures of central tendencies. One-way analysis of variance was used to examine relationships between personal characteristics and job stress. T-tests were used to determine relationships between level of stress, level of job satisfaction, and level of intent to stay according to organization type. Pearson's correlation was used to examine relationships between job stress, job satisfaction, and intent to stay.; The findings indicated that the nurses' stress level was not very high for the respondents. Position, rank, age, gender, number of dependents, or military service length had no relationship to the stress level experienced. However, females had expressed a higher level of stress than males and majors had a higher level than other ranks even though the difference was not statistically significant. The analysis also indicated that staff nurses and head nurses to a slightly lesser degree experienced more stress than nurses in other positions, nurses ages 22 through 26 were more stressed than other ages, nurses without dependents were more stressed than nurses with dependents, and nurses in the 13th to 16th years of service experienced more stress than other nurses. These differences also were not statistically significant. The level of stress experienced was not statistically related to facility type (medical center vs. community hospital). On a whole, the respondents were weakly satisfied with their job and the job satisfaction level was not related to the facility type. Intent to stay in active military service had no statistical relationship to job stress, no statistical relationship to job satisfaction, and no statistical relationship to type of organization to which the nurses were assigned.