Survey On Nurses’ Emotional Labor In 3-A-grade General Hospital In Beijing

Background:Nursing is an important part of the medical and health services. Nurses undertake the professional duties of saving lives, preventing disease, and alleviating the pain. They play an important role in building a harmonious doctor-patient relationship. Meanwhile, emotional labor is closely related to nurses’ job satisfaction, turnover intention and job burnout. Therefore, paying attention to the nurses’ emotional labor and explore the influential factors are helpful for the nursing managers to implement the targeted interventions, and ultimately stabilize the nursing team and improve the quality of nursing.Objective:To describe nurses’emotional labor in 3-A-grade general hospitals in Beijing and to explore the influential factors that affect the nurses’emotional labor.Method:A descriptive study,1017 nurses in 5 3-A-grade general hospitals in Beijing were chosen by the multi-stage sampling and were surveyed using The Emotional Labor Scale which was originally developed by Professor Grandey and then been translated into Chinese by Luo Hong and his colleagues.The demographic questionnaire and The McCloskey/Mueller Satisfaction Scale(MMSS) were administered to explore the influencing factors.Result:(1) A total of 1040 questionnaires were distributed and 928 were responded validly (response rate 89.23%). The scores of nurses’ emotional labor among 3 dimensions were ranked at a descending order as follow:deep acting, emotional display requirements and surface acting. (2) The variations in nurses’emotional labor from 3-A-grade general hospitals in Beijing were a significant difference (P<0.05) by age, educational level, years of work experience, marital status, employment forms, positional title, work shift and position. (3) The job satisfaction of nurses in Beijing was moderate. There was a positive relationship between deep acting and job satisfaction while there was a negative relationship between surface acting and job satisfaction (P<0.01) Furthermore, nurses with high job satisfaction were more likely to take deep acting during their work (P<0.05)Conclusion:Nurses were more likely to use the deep acting in work, which means they had a good career identity. Part of the demographic data had certain significant influence on nurses’emotional labor. Nurses’job satisfaction and emotional labor affected each other, but job satisfaction’s influence on emotional labor was limited.