Factors Influencing Emotional Labor Strategies Of Nurses

In recent years, the competition of Chinese hospital industry becomes fierce increasingly. This change is occurred in the context of the reform of national health care system, the opening of health care industry to the world, and the change of trend in health care consumption. Under the market-oriented goal, the public hospitals began to highlight the service encounter quality (soft side) besides their traditional good reputation in technical equipment (hard side). For nurses, this means providing more emotional service to patients.However, in the circumstances of serious shortage in the number of clinical nurses in China, it's very difficult to conduct high-intensive emotional labor. The result is that, excessive emotional labor makes nurses'burnout heavy. Then, burnout makes nurses lack of compassion, responsibility, and apathy. It seriously affects the nurse-patient relationship. Therefore, it is significant to improve nurses'emotional management and regulation ability.In this paper, we employed multiple case study to study nurses' emotional labor strategies and its impact factors in two clinical scenes-Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, and obstetrics in Women's Hospital. The two hospitals are affiliated with School of Medicine, Zhejiang University both. First, we reviewed the emotional labor and nurses'emotional labor to propose research questions and establish a preliminary theoretical framework. Second, we designed the process of case study, and confirmed the selection criteria of and the number of cases, we also decided data collection and analysis methods. Third, we employed within-case analysis to analyze two cases to establish the impact factor models of emotional labor strategies of ICU nurses and obstetric nurses, respectively. Finally, we performed a multiple case study to obtain the overall conclusions and the total impact factor model of emotional labor strategies of nurses.The conclusions are that, (1) The more emotion is needed in the clinical environment, the more emotional dissonance nurses will experience (2) Difficult patients and their families are two important sources of emotional dissonance; (3) Comforting the families of dead patients is an important source of emotional harmony; (4) The younger a nurse is, the easier she will experience emotional excess; (5) Nurses use more deep acting strategy (including situation modification, cognitive change and attention deployment) to regulate emotional dissonance nurses can use to conduct deep acting; (6) The reason why nurses take surface acting strategy is that they feel tired or they want to protect themselves from harm; (7) Nurses can use emotional detachment strategy (including attention deployment, cognitive change and pouring out) to regulate emotional excess, relaxation strategy.