The effect of hospital workers' patience levels on their psychological capital

Healthcare workers, who are subject to intense workload and emotional effort, carefully consider every aspect of their communication and approach their environment accordingly. Hospital staff bear the greatest responsibility for the effective delivery of healthcare services. The challenges or unusual situations employees face are reflected in their psychological behavior. Patience serves as a bridge to experiencing positive emotions in these situations. Furthermore, patience creates a healing and protective effect, supporting individual psychological capital components such as self-efficacy, hope, resilience, and optimism, and contributing to overall psychological well-being. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of healthcare workers' levels of patience on their psychological capital. The sample of the research consists of healthcare workers employed at a private hospital located in the Pendik district of Istanbul. Within the scope of the study, data were collected from 275 healthcare workers. The research employed a quantitative research method, and the survey technique was used as the data collection tool. For data collection, the Patience Scale, adapted into Turkish by Doğan and Gülmez (2014), and the Psychological Capital Scale, developed by Luthans et al. (2007), were utilized. According to the findings, the healthcare workers demonstrated moderate-to-high levels of patience and high levels of psychological capital. The data were found to be normally distributed, and the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirmed that the patience scale had a three-dimensional structure, while the psychological capital scale had a four-dimensional structure. Significant differences were found across demographic variables in terms of age, years of service, and level of education. Correlation analyses revealed positive and significant relationships between the dimensions of patience and psychological capital. Regression analyses revealed that among all patience dimensions, optimism and long-term patience had the greatest impact on the resilience dimension, while interpersonal patience had the greatest impact on the dimensions of hope and self-efficacy. These results demonstrate that patience is an important psychological resource that enhances individuals' levels of self-efficacy, hope, resilience, and optimism.