Shift work, emotional labour and psychological well-being of nursing staff

Abstract

This study explored the effect of emotional labour and the psychological experience of shift work on the psychological well-being at work (PWBW) of long term care nursing staff (n = 206). The ‘psychological experience of shift work’ construct defines the perception of the negative effect that working shifts has on the employees’ daily life. Correlation and multiple regression analyses were conducted. Support was found for the negative relationships between the psychological experience of shift work and PWBW, as well as the emotional labour dimension of surface acting and PWBW. A hierarchical regression analysis suggested that, when controlling for the effect of emotional labour and certain demographic variables (including number of dependents, tenure and actual shift worked), a significant amount of unique variance in PWBW, could be accounted for by the psychological experience of shift work. These results indicate that the PWBW of nursing staff is not only influenced by which shift the individual is on (i.e. day or night shift), but more so by the individuals’ psychological experience of shift work.

Keywords

• shift work
• emotional labour
• psychological well-being
• nursing