Job Stressors and Burnout in Hospitals: The Mediating Role of Emotional Dissonance

The aim of the present study was to better understand the relationship among job stressors, emotional dissonance, and burnout by exploring the mediating role of emotional dissonance between the variables. The study was conducted with a sample of 445 nurses and health care assistants from a general hospital. Four of their specific job stressors were taken into account (workload, patients' and relatives' requirements, patients' suffering, and team collaboration problems) and measured with the WSINO (Borteyrou, Truchot, & Rascle, 2014). Burnout was measured with the MBI General Survey (Schaufeli, Leiter, Maslach, & Jackson, 1996) and emotional dissonance was measured with the scale developed by Andela, Truchot, and Borteyrou (2015). On the basis of Edwards' (1992) cybernetic stress theory and Diefendorff and Gosserand's (2003) theoretical model, we proposed that these job stressors are related to burnout through their influence on emotional dissonance. First, results indicate that emotional dissonance and workload, patients' and relatives' requirements, patients' suffering, and coworkers stress were related to burnout. Second, mediation analysis confirmed the mediating role of emotional dissonance between workload, patient's suffering, and burnout. Results contribute to the literature by underlining the relevance of including emotional dissonance in analyzing the relationship between job stressors and burnout.