A Study On The Relationship Between Emotional Labor And Related Factors About Nurses

As Smith (1992) applied the notion of emotional labour to the study of student nursing, in the literature has been recognized that nurses engaged in emotional labor as part of their professional work. Emotional labor can be defined as the management of a person's internal feelings and external conduct to the performance of the appropriate emotions. Its value began to be recognized in the medical and health work. Nurses establish relationships through the implementation of emotional labor, which is a symbol of emotional expression of concern and care, and can make the patient feel comfortable and trust the motives and actions of nurses.Studies have shown that long-term emotional labor can have a number of potential negative impacts, and even affect the organizational performance.The quantitative study based on the revised abroad scale, to nursing staff as the research object in order to compared the emotional labor in the differences in demographic variables, explored the relationship between emotional labor and emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, the relationship between emotional intelligence and emotional labor, the mediating role of emotional labor in the emotional intelligence and emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, the moderating role of work autonomy, job involvement. This study reached the following conclusions:1. There are significant differences in the emotional labor load between nurses of different demographic variables. Older, married, length of service longer and nursing supervisor have higher of emotional labor load; nurses in the top three hospitals, duration and frequency of emotional labor is higher than nurses in 2B hospital; informal indenture of nurses, duration and frequency of emotional labor is higher than formal indenture of nurses.2. Emotional labor intensity and surface acting and emotional exhaustion showed a significant positive correlation, surface acting and job satisfaction showed a significant negative correlation. There was no significant correlation between the deep acting and emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. Total and surface acting of emotional labor can significantly predicted emotional exhaustion,and only the surface acting has significant predictive effect on the job satisfaction.3. There was a significant positive correlation between emotional labor and emotional intelligence. Surface acting, only with others' emotion appraisal of emotional intelligence dimensions were significantly positively correlated, with emotional intelligence as a whole there was no significant correlation; while deep acting and the various dimensions of emotional intelligence showed a significant positive correlation. Emotional intelligence as a whole, and others' emotion appraisal are the significant predictors of emotional labor.4. Emotional labor incompletely mediated the effect of emotional intelligence on emotional exhaustion. Emotional labor is not a mediator in the effect of emotional intelligence on job satisfaction.5. Work autonomy and job involvement did not moderate the relationship between surface acting and emotional exhaustion, while the work autonomy and job involvement moderate the relationship between surface acting and job satisfaction: The relationship becomes weaker when employees receive more work autonomy or job involvement. The relationship becomes stronger when employees receive less work autonomy or job involvement. That is, individuals with high levels of work autonomy or job involvement are less likely than those with low work autonomy or job involvement to experience negative effects of emotional labor on job satisfaction.The purpose of the qualitative study was to validate the author's connotation on a nurse's emotional labor, which was based on the works of Hochschild (1983) on emotional labor and England & Farkas (1986) view of the emotional work. The subject of this study consisted of nurses in a hospital in Zhejiang, through semi-structured depth interviews to explore a nurse's connotation of the emotional labor profoundly in perspective of nurses. Explore the causes, methods, emotion display rules and work outcomes of the emotional labor about nurses. The results of this study as follows:causes of a nurse's emotional labor included the patient's disease, some inconsistencies in some understanding of the issues between nurses and patients, some specific tasks, the patients'dissatisfaction for the health care system, facilities, as well as the relationship between nurses and so on; emotion display rules mainly included "smiling service", ethics and responsibility of nurses are the important reasons for identity with the emotion display rules; the strategy of emotional labor mainly included of restraint, silence, avoid and transposition thinking in work; Nurses will use a variety of ways such as verbal and non-verbal communication to regulate the patient's emotion; the negative emotions of nurses in the work will spillover into the home, communicate with colleagues was an outlet for the negative emotions in general, to a certain extent, the emotional labor of nurses constitutes a working pressure and can affect job satisfaction. Finally, this study provides several recommendations for relative nursing managers.