A Study On The Effect Of Patient Mistreatment On Nurses’ Work Attitudes And Self-sacrificing Behavior

In recent years,more and more media and scholars have focused on physical violence in the healthcare service industry,while the widespread verbal and attitude attacks from patients have not received wide attention.A review of domestic and foreign literature shows that most of the current researches on customer mistreatment focus on front-line service workers such as call center employees,restaurant or hotel waiters,retail staff or salesmen,while less attention is paid to the service workers in the healthcare service industry.Given the prevalence and severity of mistreatment by patients,more research is urgently needed in this unique context.In addition,relevant studies have verified the negative effects of customer mistreatment on service employees’ work performance and some work attitudes and behaviors,but there are still some important outcome variables rela ted to customer mistreatment that have not been involved.What’s more,most studies on the internal influence mechanism of customer mistreatment are based on the mediating mechanisms of negative mood(emotions),emotional exhaustion and cognitive rumination,which have not been explored by scholars from the perspective of status perception.Although scholars have made some achievements in searching for moderating mechanisms to prevent or mitigate the negative effects of customer mistreatment,yet no scholars have explored appropriate moderators from the perspective of leadership.This study focuses on the specific patient mistreatment in the healthcare service industry and takes nurses as the research object.Based on the conservation of resource theory,this study explores the effects of patient mistreatment on nurses’ work attitudes(job satisfaction,professional commitment)and self-sacrificing behavior,as well as the mediating effect of nurses’ perceived social status and perceived insider status,and verify the moderating effect of servant leadership.This research conducted a three-stage questionnaire survey among nurses from 5 general hospitals,and finally obtained 995 valid data after matching.In this study,SPSS software was used to perform common method deviation test,reliability analysis,and descriptive statistical analysis on the obtained valid data,and regression analysis was used to test the hypothesis proposed in this study.The results show that patient mistreatment has a significant negative effect on nurses’ work attitudes(job satisfaction,professional commitment)and self-sacrificing behavior.Patient mistreatment has a significant negative influence on nurses’ perceived social status and perceived insider status.Nurses’ perceived social status has a significant mediating effect in the negative relationship between patient mistreatment and nurses’ work attitudes(job satisfaction and occupational commitment),while perceived social status and perceived insider status have a significant dual mediating effect in the negative relationship between patient mistreatment and nurses’ self-sacrificing behavior.Moreover,servant leadership has a significant moderating effect between patient mistreatment and nurses’ perceived insider status,while there is no significant moderating effect between patient mistreatment and nurses’ perceived social status.This study not only contributes to the study of the mechanism of customer mistreatment,but also has important significance to the hospital management practice.