Investigation on the emotional labor levels and relationship between emotional labor, job satisfaction and burnout of academicians working in nursing undergraduate programs

Nursing education involves both theory and practice, which require nurse academics to interact face to face both with nursing students during teaching process, and individuals, families and other health care professionals in practice. Besides their educational responsibilities, nurse academicians have to conduct research, participate scientific meetings, publish and contribute to scientific knowledge, and perform administrative works to progress through their academic careers. Thus, emotional labor is an important part of the academic life. This descriptive and correlational study was conducted to investigate the relationship between emotional labor levels, job satisfaction and burnout of 474 nurse academicians working in nursing undergraduate programs of state universities located at seven geographical areas of in Turkey in 2019. Ethical approval, written permissions of Universities, authors' permissions who conducted Turkish validity and reliability studies of instruments, and informed consents of participants were obtained. Data were collected through using "Descriptive Characteristics Form", "Emotional Labor Scale", "The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory" and the "Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire". Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, skewness and kurtosis, t test, one-way analysis of variance, Hierarchical regression model and path analysis which is a structural equation model. According to the results, nurse academicians mostly preferred to display genuine acting, (4.38±0.65), deep acting (2.89±1.22), and surface acting (1.84±0.79) respectively. Nurse academicians highest mean scores obtained from burnout and job satisfaction scales were work-related burnout (48.32±15.3) and internal job satisfaction (46.32±6.79). Emotional labor was a determinant factor on job satisfaction and burnout. Results indicated positive correlation between surface acting and all dimensions of burnout, and negative correlation between genuine acting and burnout. Working as a nurse academician in Faculty of Nursing increased work and student related burnout, while being a research assistant/lecturer and female gender increased personal burnout. Both deep acting and genuine acting have increased job satisfaction, while being a research assistant/lecturer, personal burnout and wok-related burnout have led to decrease in job satisfaction. Based on the results, scientific meetings towards increasing the awareness of nurse academicians on the importance of genuine acting and deep acting during their interactions between students, and further research on investigating factors that affect burnout and job satisfaction at academic institutions are suggested. Key Words: Academia, emotional labor, nursing, nursing education, job satisfaction, burnout