Nurses Burnout: Does Personality and Social Support Relate?

Abstract

Work stress is a major health problem for both individual employee and organizations. Burnout is a specific kind of occupational stress among health care workers that results from demanding and emotionally charged relationships between caregivers and their recipients (Maslach & Schaufeli, 1993). Burnout is a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job. Nurses have been identified as one of the professional groups in the health service that experiences high levels of stress. Most burnout researches focused either environment or individual characteristics in burnout studies. The present study explores both the social support and personality factors on the burnout of hospital nurses. Stratified random samples of 79 nurses were selected. Maslach Burnout Inventory, Big Five Locator and Perceived Social Support scale were used to collect the data. The results revealed that specific dimensions of personality do significantly and differentially correlate with the experience of the three components of burnout. Findings also indicate that nurses differ significantly on burnout due to their perceived social support.

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