engleski

Conflict Perception and Emotional Labour in Nursing

More and more intense way of life and work, global crisis which causes lack of work resources, make it more difficult to provide adequate health care and lead to stress and conflict at different levels of healthcare activities. Healthcare professionals are exposed to emotional labour on a daily basis. Continuous management and regulation of their emotions may exhaust them, make their work harder and increase the occurrence of conflict. On the other hand, it is possible that conflict itself could be the source of stress and negative emotions which require greater emotional labour in order to be concealed or suppressed. The aim of this research was to examine different features of conflict in the workplace, the level of emotional labour experienced by nurses, and the relationship between the perception of conflict and emotional labour. The research was carried out anonymously on the convenience sample of 104 female (94.2%) and male (5.8%) nurses at the Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Zagreb. The average age of the participants was 36 years, and their average work experience was 15.9 years. For the purpose of the research the Questionnaire on Various Features of Conflict by Stojčić & Perković, and the Questionnaire on Emotional labour by Näring, Briët & Brouwers were used. 76% of the participants perceive conflict as destructive. Conflict in the workplace is not frequent, and the majority of the participants consider themselves as successful in constructive resolution of conflict. Persons with longer work experience enter into conflict more often. Nurses are not exposed to intense emotional labour ; workers with secondary education invest greater emotional labour than those with university education. The hierarchical analysis has shown that it is possible to explain 38.4% of the variance of conflict frequency with sets of predictors (age, education level, different work problems, emotional labour). The most important predictors were age, problematic behavior of colleagues and expressing positive emotions. Emotional labour has a significant, but small part in conflict frequency.

nurses ; conflict ; emotional labour

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