Recurring shortages of nursing peoplepower in recent Korean society have impacted nursing organizations with burnout accounting for a major part of nursing staff turnover. Thus, we studied the associations between workplace bullying, positive psychological capital, and social support and whether they predict nursing burnout. We used hierarchical regression analysis to observe changes in influencing factors by sequentially entering general traits, workplace bullying, positive psychological capital, and social support from 166 clinical nurses at two hospitals. The analysis showed that being female (β = 0.18), working three shifts (β = 0.40), workplace bullying (β = 0.24), and positive psychological capital (β = −0.28) were predictors of burnout (F = 11.25, p < 0.001), explaining 44.5% of the variance. An analysis of the correlations between burnout, workplace bullying, positive psychological capital, and social support revealed that workplace bullying was positively correlated with burnout (r = 0.36, p < 0.001), and positive psychological capital (r = −0.49, p < 0.001) and social support (r = −0.37, p < 0.001) were negatively correlated with burnout. Thus, the higher positive psychological capital within an organization, the lower the level of burnout, suggesting that organizations should consider education programs to promote positive psychological capital. In addition, healthy organizational culture should be promoted by monitoring workplace bullying.

The purpose of this research is to identify a path model to explain burnout in community mental health professionals based on the compassion satisfaction–compassion fatigue (CS-CF) model. A total of 125 mental health professionals, including nurses, social professionals, and psychologists working in mental health welfare centers in various regions across South Korea were surveyed using a structured questionnaire. A path analysis was conducted using SPSS 24.0 and AMOS 24.0. The results showed that compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue are significant predictors of burnout (β = −0.20, p = 0.011; β = 0.40, p < 0.001, respectively). The indirect pathways associated with burnout included occupational stress (β = 0.21, p = 0.021) and experience with aggressive behavior in the workplace (β = 0.33, p = 0.004) through maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation and compassion satisfaction. The total effect of the variables on burnout via compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction explained 62.5% of burnout among mental health professionals. These findings indicate that providing nursing interventions might reduce compassion fatigue and increase compassion satisfaction to reduce burnout. Furthermore, intervention programs that help to reduce the use of maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies are necessary to effectively reduce burnout in mental health professionals.