Does Emotional Labour Influence Burnout?

Abstract

Background: Over the last few years, India is experiencing a revolution in the hospital sector. Due to increase in the diseases, it has become the responsibility of hospitals and medical staff to provide the best facilities and the personal touch to the patients. While doing this job, the medical staff has to undergo through emotional labou and burnout.

Purpose: The objective of this study is to find the influence of emotional labour on job satisfaction in selected public and private hospitals of Punjab. The data was collected from doctors, nurses and paramedical staff (ratio 1:2:1) working in public and private hospitals .The total sample of 1193 was selected from six public hospitals and six private hospitals of Punjab.

Methods: The Dutch Questionnaire on Emotional Labor (D-QEL) developed and validated by Geared Nearing, Mariette Briet and Andre Browers(2005) and burnout tool by Pines and Aronson (1988) was used to assess physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. Descriptive statistics was applied to check the level of emotional labour and burnout, correlation was applied for relationship study and regression was applied to find the influence of emotional labour on burnout.

 Results: Results showed that medical staff in public and private hospitals was performing emotional labour on a low level but in comparison to public hospitals, it was more in private hospitals. There was a positive but a low correlation between emotional labour and burnout.

Conclusion: Emotional labour has not emerge as the significant predictor of burnout. It was observed from the descriptive statistics that the medical staff working in both type of hospitals were doing emotional labour on low level so their scores of burnout was not influenced by emotional labour. There might be the other reasons such as long working hours, frequency of interactions with the patients, demographic variables etc. that can contribute to the burnout.