Burnout and Engagement: Personality Profiles in Nursing Professionals

Abstract

The burnout syndrome, which affects many healthcare workers, has recently attracted wide interest due to the severe repercussions related to its effects. Although job factors determine its development, not all individuals exposed to the same work conditions show burnout, which demonstrates the importance of individual variables, such as personality. The purpose of this study was to determine the personality characteristics of a sample of nursing professionals based on the Big Five model. After having determined the personality profiles, we aimed to analyze the differences in burnout and engagement based on those profiles. The sample was made up of 1236 nurses. An ad hoc questionnaire was prepared to collect the sociodemographic data and the Brief Burnout Questionnaire, the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale and the Big Five Inventory-10 were used. The results showed that the existence of burnout in this group of workers is associated negatively with extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience, and it is associated positively with the neuroticism personality trait. These personality factors showed the opposite patterns with regard to engagement. Three different personality profiles were also found in nursing personnel, in which professionals who had a profile marked by strong neuroticism and low scores on the rest of the personality traits were the most affected by burnout.

Predicting Nurses Burnout through Quality of Work Life and Psychological Empowerment: A Study Towards Sustainable Healthcare Services in Malaysia

“…For the invaluable services rendered by the nursing professionals to the society, it is necessary that they are provided the necessary working conditions to reduce burnout symptoms. As burnout affects many healthcare workers [40], treating the symptoms of the burnout can enhance individuals willing to work for a better healthy society [41,42]. The challenging nature of nursing work makes it one of the difficult professions [1].…”

Personality and job creativity in relation to engagement in nursing

“…It provides information on three commitment dimensions: Vigor (6 items), Dedication (5 items) and Absorption (6 items). Its psychometric properties show adequate reliability and validity and it has been widely used for nurses (Montgomery et al, 2015;Pérez-Fuentes et al, 2019a).…”

“…In the work context, personality has been found to be related to factors such as stress, motivational values or access to entrepreneurial activity, which are associated with performance and improvement of professional practice (Cheng et al, 2020;Nurhasanah et al, 2020;Pérez-Fuentes et al, 2019a, Tehrani et al, 2013, Sovia et al, 2018. In recent years, these findings have contributed to its being dealt with, to a certain extent, as a variable subject to research in the healthcare context, where the Extraversion personality factor has been demonstrated to be the most highly correlated with personal competency (Lcho et al, 2019).…”

Can Engagement Go Awry and Lead to Burnout? The Moderating Role of the Perceived Motivational Climate

“…Our study offers two key theoretical contributions to the occupational health psychology literature. First, the downside of work engagement has been inadequately researched [12,13] and the existing conceptualizations and research findings concerning work engagement and burnout are inconsistent [22,23]. Some argue that these concepts are at opposite ends of a continuum [24], others suggest that they are antipodal counterparts but distinct concepts [25], and still others advocate that they may not be independent phenomena [26].…”

“…Mastery and performance climates may add a contextual element to the understanding of the engagement-burnout relationship by clarifying how employees are sensitive to and process salient contextual cues, goals, and values (cf. [23,31]). Differentiated contextual cue information processing may affect employees’ action strategies for these goals, which in turn may affect their well-being [35,36].…”