Positive Psychological Capital Mediates the Association between Burnout and Nursing Performance Outcomes among Hospital Nurses

Abstract

Nursing burnout is associated with reduced nursing performance outcomes. Positive psychological capital is known to play an important role in improving workers’ job performance. However, the association among the three variables has rarely been addressed. The purpose of this cross-sectional descriptive study was to explore the association between burnout and nursing performance outcomes among Korean nurses working at a tertiary hospital and the mediating role of psychological capital in this relationship. Recruited through convenience sampling, a total of 285 nurses provided data on their demographic characteristics and completed a structured questionnaire consisting of items from the Professional Quality of Life Scale (burnout), Nursing Performance Scale, and Psychology Capital Questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, student’s t-tests, one-way analysis of variance, Pearson’s correlation coefficients, and multiple linear regression analyses were used to analyze data. The significance of the mediation effect was obtained using a bootstrap approach with the PROCESS macro. The mean age of participants was 30.51 years, and most participants were females (94.0%) and unmarried (71.6%); more than half (57.5%) experienced a severe workload. The average (±standard deviation) scores of burnout, nursing performance outcomes, and positive psychological capital were 28.77 ± 4.93, 2.98 ± 0.32, and 3.19 ± 0.45, respectively. Burnout was associated with nursing performance among clinical nurses (β = −0.20, p < 0.001). Positive psychological capital mediated the association between burnout and nursing performance outcomes (β = 0.41, p < 0.001). These findings contribute to the understanding that burnout among nurses could be reduced by increased positive psychological capital, which results in improved performance outcomes. The findings also indicate that interventions to improve positive psychological capital should be developed and implemented for nurses’ burnout management and improvement in nursing performance outcomes.

Effects of role overload, work engagement and perceived organisational support on nurses' job performance during the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Nurses spend more time with patients than ever before, and patient outcomes are affected by nursing care quality. Excellent nursing job performance ensures that patients are provided appropriate nursing care, and job performance can be included in an evaluation index of nursing quality (An et al, 2020 ). Thus, improvements in nurses' job performance under such special conditions are particularly important.…”

Association between psychological capital and spiritual care competencies of clinical nurses: A multicentre cross‐sectional study

“…Dwyer et al., (2019) reported that US nurses had moderate psychological capital. An et al., (2020) found that hospital nurses from South Korea experienced middle levels of psychological capital. Previous studies have found that high psychological capital would enhance nurses’ clinical performance, alleviate depression, burnout and turnover intention and increase the quality of clinical care (Brunetto et al., 2016).…”

Inovation for Nurses Burnout Intervention: A Systematic Review

“…First, the aspects of workload and time pressure were associated with emotional exhaustion. The job overload spent worker capacity to fulfill the needs of work, especially in a few time of rest and recovery (An et al, 2020). The lack individual control in the work environment over goal achievement was closely related to emotional exhaustion.…”

“…The research finding has referred that burnout was related to nursing performance through mediation of positive psychological capital. Moreover, the result has also said that the nurses who have higher level of positive psychological capital would be less affected by burnout incident and might perform the better nursing care than other coworkers (An et al, 2020).…”