We’re Not Gonna Fall: Depressive Complaints, Personal Resilience, Team Social Climate, and Worries about Infections among Hospital Workers during a Pandemic

Abstract

Maintaining hospital workers’ psychological health is essential for hospitals’ capacities to sustain organizational functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers’ personal resilience can be an important factor in preserving psychological health, but how this exactly works in high stakes situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, requires further exploration. Similarly, the role of team social climate as contributor to individual psychological health seems obvious, but how it exactly prevents workers from developing depressive complaints in prolonged crises remains under investigated. The present paper therefore applies conservation of resources theory to study the relationships between resilience, team social climate, and depressive complaints, specifically focusing on worries about infections as an important explanatory mechanism. Based on questionnaire data of 1126 workers from five hospitals in the Netherlands during the second peak of the pandemic, this paper estimates a moderated-mediation model. This model shows that personal resilience negatively relates to depressive complaints (β = −0.99, p < 0.001, 95%CI = −1.45–−0.53), partially as personal resilience is negatively associated with worries about infections (β = −0.42, p < 0.001, 95%CI = −0.50–−0.33) which in turn are positively related to depressive complaints (β = 0.75, p < 0.001, 95% CI = 0.31–1.19). Additionally, team social climate is associated with a lower effect of worries about being infected and infecting others on depressive complaints (β = −0.88, p = 0.03, 95% CI = −1.68–−0.09). These findings suggest that resilience can be an important individual level resource in preventing depressive complaints. Moreover, the findings imply that hospitals have an important responsibility to maintain a good team social climate to shield workers from infection related worries building up to depressive complaints.

Resilience, Coping Strategies and Posttraumatic Growth in the Workplace Following COVID-19: A Narrative Review on the Positive Aspects of Trauma

“…Through resilience, emotion-focused strategies were negatively related to psychological distress directly and indirectly in a sample of Spanish nurses [ 42 ]. Resilience was negatively correlated with depression, stress and anxiety [ 44 , 46 , 54 , 65 , 68 , 71 ]. Age, work experience and level of education had a significant positive correlation with nurses’ resilience score [ 45 ].…”

“…As evidenced by previous research, psychological resilience is a fundamental variable in reducing and preventing the negative psychological effects of the pandemic [ 18 ]. In our review, we found that resilience is associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety and burnout [ 44 , 46 , 53 , 54 , 65 , 68 , 71 ]. Resilience improves personal growth and perceived professional benefits [ 33 , 53 ] and has a positive impact on work engagement even in non-healthcare workers [ 28 ].…”

Stress Perception, Sleep Quality and Work Engagement of German Outpatient Nurses during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…As the scope of questions related to pandemic concern was limited in our study, more precise explanations of this remarkable result are not possible. There is evidence that resilience [ 71 , 72 ] can mediate pandemic-related concerns. However, our data also do not allow us to draw conclusions about the causes or determinants of the rather moderate level of worry and the lack of association with perceived stress.…”

What have we learned about what works in sustaining mental health care and support services during a pandemic? Transferable insights from the COVID-19 response

“…Alongside coping with psychosocial stressors from their personal worries and concerns associated with COVID-19 (Fleuren et al, 2021;Taylor et al, 2020), MHWs bear the professional responsibility of responding to increased demand and rapidly adapting their mental health service models, which have experienced significant disruptions (Moreno et al, 2020;WHO, 2020a). With a view to contain COVID-19, remote tele-therapies have largely replaced in-person sessions (Scottish Government, 2020;Whaibeh et al, 2020).…”