Emotional Labor, Burnout, Medical Error, and Turnover Intention among South Korean Nursing Staff in a University Hospital Setting

Abstract

Nurses are vulnerable to mental health challenges, including burnout, as they are exposed to adverse job conditions such as high workload. The mental health of this population can relate not only to individual well-being but also to patient safety outcomes. Therefore, there is a need for a mental health improvement strategy that targets this population. This cross-sectional survey study investigates emotional labor, burnout, turnover intention, and medical error levels among 117 nursing staff members in a South Korean university hospital; it also analyzes correlations among outcomes and conduct correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis to determine relationships among these factors. The participants had moderate to high levels of emotional labor and burnout, and 23% had experienced medical errors within the last six months. Save for medical errors, all outcomes significantly and positively correlated with each other. These results can be used to improve the mental health outcomes of nurses working in the hospital and their consequences. Specifically, the job positions of nursing personnel may be a major consideration in such a strategy, and job-focused emotional labor and employee-focused emotional labor may be promising targets in ameliorating turnover intention and client-related burnout, respectively.

Burnout: A Review of Theory and Measurement

“…Gender and age differences in personal discrimination experience, burnout, and job stress among physiotherapists and occupational therapists are examined in South Korea [132]. Nurses in South Korea are further studied with respect to emotional labor, burnout, turnover intention, and medical error levels within the previous six months [133]. Healthcare workers are also the focus of another study in Japan [134], which concludes that the number of physical symptoms perceived are positively related to burnout scores.…”

The association between fear of COVID‐19 and mental health: The mediating roles of burnout and job stress among emergency nursing staff

“…The continuous burnout among nurses may deteriorate their health and specifically their mental health which may affect their performance at work (Hamed et al., 2020 ; Zeng et al., 2020 ). That is, burnout has strongly been associated with reduced job performance, poor quality of care, poor patient safety, adverse events, patient negative experience, medical errors, infections, patient falls and intention to leave (Al Sabei et al., 2020 ; Dall'Ora et al., 2020 ; Kwon et al., 2021 ) This leaves a huge financial burden and serious administrative challenges for the health authorities (managers and directors). For instance, the estimated financial cost for burnout‐related turnover among US physicians and nurses was $17 and $14 billion, respectively, per annum (National Taskforce for Humanity in Healthcare, 2018 ).…”

Relationship between perceived organizational support and professional values of nurses: mediating effect of emotional labor

“…Emotional labor has both positive and negative effects on work. Previous studies on nurses’ emotional labor paid more attention to the negative impact of emotional labor, such as depression, emotional exhaustion and job burnout [ 44 , 45 ] But the positive effects of emotional labor, which was beneficial to nurses’ work engagement, had also been reported [ 18 ]. Our study found that emotional labor could promote the development of nurses’ professional values.…”