The relationship between personality and job stress, burnout, satisfaction and resilience in Taiwanese cancer nurses

Yeh, Tzu-Pei

Abstract

Aim
The aim of this study is to test the relationship between personality, job stress, burnout, satisfaction and resilience in Taiwanese cancer nurses.

Background
The retention of nurses is a global issue which is closely related to patients’ safety and the quality of nursing care. Job stress, burnout and satisfaction influence nurses’ intentions to leave their jobs. Job stressors, levels of stress and burnout, coping strategies selection, and influential factors of job satisfaction such as leadership type have been broadly investigated. Personality is the deciding factor in how people perceive the environment and events, and it affects an individual’s stress and behaviour in an organization. Resilience has been noted as a mediator of stress. Nurses possessing certain personality characteristics may adapt to their jobs better than others by showing less stress and burnout, and higher job satisfaction. The difficulties of nursing care vary across different specialised contexts; therefore, further research should emphasise specific nursing specialists such as cancer nurses.

Design
Mixed research methods with questionnaire survey and in-depth interview was used.

Methods
The NEO Five Factor Inventory-3 (Coast and McCare, 1992), the Nurse Stress Checklist ; (Benoliel, 1990; translated into Chinese by Tsai, 1993), the MBI-Human Services Survey (Maslach et al., 2001), the Nurse’s Job Satisfaction Scale (Lin et al., 2007b) and the Brief Resilience Scale (Smith et al., 2008) were selected as the measurement tools in this research. An interview guideline was developed based on the components of selected questionnaires to check the validity of the questionnaires and to investigate significant relationships in the statistical results. T-test, Pearson’s correlation, ANOVA (analysis of variance) and structural equation modelling (SEM) were used to test the relationships between variables; content analysis was used to analyse interviews.

Results
Cancer nurses’ personality successfully predicted their resilience, stress, burnout, job satisfaction and intention to stay. Personality especially explained resilience, stress and burnout. Nurses’ resilience acted as a negative mediator to burnout, while stress mediated burnout positively.

Conclusion
A personality test could be used in recruiting nurses, making nursing career plan and proposing effective interventions to increase nurses’ resilience and diminish nurses’ stress and burnout. Further studies in other nursing professionals are needed.

Citation

Yeh, T.-P. (2016). The relationship between personality and job stress, burnout, satisfaction and resilience in Taiwanese cancer nurses. (Thesis). University of Hull. Retrieved from https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4218397

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Aug 4, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 23, 2023
• Keywords: Nursing
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4218397
• Additional Information: Department of Midwifery and Child Health, The University of Hull
• Award Date: Apr 1, 2016