Negative Impact of Workplace Bullying and Extended Shift Timings on Mental Health of Nursing Professionals

Running head: NURSING
Nursing
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Introduction
Resilience is regarded as an important factor of nursing. Resilience is defined as an
ability of bounce back (Skovholt, & Trotter-Mathison, 2016 p. 125). Gillepsie, Chaboyer and
Wallis (2009) stated that resilience is an important strategy for the nursing professionals as it
helps in facilitating stressful situation. Stress is a one of the major concerns in nursing.
Common stressors in nursing include increased workload, poor inter-personal relationships,
lack of proper self-care, and uncertainty in the work condition, workplace bullying and
increased shift timings (Yılmaz, 2017). The following papers aims to critically examine two
workplace stressor factors like bullying and extended shift timings and how it cast a negative
impact on the overall mental health of the nursing professionals. This will be followed by
identification of one strategy that can be used for resilience building under the workplace
settings in order to increase the overall mental well-being of the nurses. Improvement of the
mental well-being of the nursing professionals helps to improve the overall quality of care.
The paper thus will help in throw light regarding how self-coping strategy can be used to
handle the work stress, anxiety and depression management.
Negative impact of workplace place bullying
The arduous mental and other physical work of the nurses, the slow nursing staff
setbacks along with lack of recognition that the nurses experience about their nursing skills
and their overall capabilities can be regarded as some of the traits that act of as bullying
between the nursing professionals and the management, between the nursing professionals
and the patients or their family members or in-between the nursing team-mates. Workplace
bullying has significant physical and mental health outcomes over the victims. This outcome
in turn hampers the overall quality of care that the nurses offer to their patients (Wright &
Khatri, 2015).The cross-sectional study conducted by Karatza et al. (2016) over 841 nursing

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professionals working in five different hospitals in the Athens highlighted workplace bullying
hampers their psychological well-being. Getting harassed during their shift-timing by their
co-workers or by the family members of the patients is emotional taxing. It hampers their
level of self-esteem and at the same time increase the level of stress and depressive
symptoms. This depressive state of mind results in increase in the nursing turnover under the
hospital settings, decrease in job satisfaction and quality of care. Han and Ha (2016)
conducted a study in order to explore the relationships with self-esteem, social support,
culture of organization and workplace bullying over the mental health of the nursing
professionals. The interview conducted over the nursing professionals based on their lived
experiences highlighted that work-place bullying leads to the generation of poor self-esteem
and in turn leads to a decrease in the level of job satisfaction. Increasing the organizational
atmosphere and the support coming from peers and the family members can help to improve
the outcome. The workplace bullying is experienced by 27 to 80% of the nursing
professionals and bullying negatively impact the health of the nurses. The major mental
impact of the workplace bullying is experienced by the female nursing professionals (Sauer
& McCoy, 2017). The cross-sectional study over 345 nurses also revealed that higher is the
incidence of bullying, lower is the mental and the physical health score. This leads to increase
rate of absentees, decrease level of job-satisfaction, increase in the rate of medication error
and increased nursing turn-over. In other words in can be said that nurses who become
victims of workplace bullying experiences poor quality of life and this in turn impedes their
ability to deliver safe and quality patient care (Sauer & McCoy, 2017).
Negative impact on extended shift-timing
Shift-timings are considered crucial for ensuring the overall continuity of care under
the hospital settings. The night shift is considered as one of the frequently registered reasons