Abstract

Objective: This study focused on assessing nurses’ emotional labor levels.

Method: This descriptive study was done with 208 nurses who worked at intensive care service and inpatient services of a university hospital. The data were collected using Information Request Form and Emotional Labor Scale and were analyzed with percentages, arithmetical means, ANOVA, Kruskall Wallis, t or Mann Whitney-U test.

Results: Nurses received an average score of 2.80±0.68 from total emotional labor scale. As for subdimensions, nurses received 3.29±0.88 in deep acting subdimension, 3.23±0.77 in emotional effort subdimension and 2.26±0.86 in surface acting subdimension. Nurses who were aged ≥36 years and served for 1-10 patients per a day had higher scores in surface acting subdimension and total emotional labor scale than others; which was statistically significant. Besides, scores of emotional effort subdimension of those nurses who were married and scores of deep acting subdimension of those nurses who were satisfied with managers were higher than others; which was statistically found significant (p<0.05).

Conclusion: Nurses use moderate level of emotional labor while they are caring for their patients and they demonstrate more surface acting and use more emotional labor as their ages increase and number of patients per day is ≤10.