Case Study on Occupational Stress and Job Performance of Nurses

This case study explores the impact of occupational stress on nurses' job performance through a review of existing literature. The study identifies factors contributing to occupational stress, such as conflicts with patients and colleagues, heavy workloads, lack of work-life balance, and demanding departmental postings. These stressors negatively affect nurses' quality of life and the quality of care they provide. The review highlights the correlation between occupational stress and health problems, decreased competence, and increased absenteeism among nursing staff. It concludes by emphasizing the need for strategies to mitigate occupational stress in nursing to improve the well-being of nurses and the quality of patient care. Desklib provides access to this case study and a variety of other solved assignments.

Running head: LITERATURE REVIEW
Case Study Format
Tile: Impact of occupation stress of nurse on their job performance
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1LITERATURE REVIEW
Introduction:
Literature Review:
Occupational stress is typically defined as the circumstance under which an employee is
subjected to job associated factors that result in a modification in the physiological or
psychological condition, and deviates the people from their usual functioning. Time and again
it has been proved that occupational stress creates substantial damage on the mental and
physical health of the affected individual (Sarafis et al. 2016). Furthermore, increased levels of
occupational stress have also been found to greater rates of staff truancy and reduced levels
of their productivity. This calls for the need of exploring the impacts that the occupational
stress faced by nursing professionals create on their work performance.

2LITERATURE REVIEW
Parveen et al. (2017) has provided evidence for the fact that 41% of medical attendants were
subjected to outrageous work weight and stress at their workplaces and an estimated 59% of
them had to suffer comprehensive high apprehension cutting-edge the prior individual
month. The research was based on the routine acceptance of stress in the job of a healthcare
worker. Upon conduction of a correlational study that involved the use of the Perceived
Occupational Stress Scale, high response rate (78%) indicated the prevalence of occupational
stress amid the professionals, with 59% attendants belonging to the age group 25-30 years,
reporting momentous rates of stress. This was in accordance with the findings of Nabirye et
al. (2011) who aimed to investigate the levels of occupational stress, and its potential impact
on job performance and satisfaction, among hospital nurses. Conduction of a correlational
study revealed that there existed significant variations between the levels of occupational
stress, performance and job satisfaction, with older age group of nurses (50–60 years)
demonstrating maximum mean score (90.3), followed by 40–49 years with a mean of 84.9.
Furthermore, nurses belonging to the 20–29 year group manifested statistically greater job
gratification, in comparison to the 40-49 or 30–39 years groups.
On assessing the perception of nurses regarding occupational stress, three categories were
developed namely, “professional interest”, “nurses’ perception from the job stress”, and
“prioritizing career over family life”. Some of the cited reasons that were believed to create
an impact on the nurses were being in some alarming circumstance, absence of logistics and
experience, nurse shortage, objectionable relation amid colleagues, uninterested
professionals, personal problems, and organization irregularities. The findings suggested that
any of these risk factors had a potential of increasing occupational stress upon nurses, thus
affecting their life (Adib-Hajbaghery, Khamechian and Alavi 2012). Similar risk factors were
also identified by Sharma et al. (2014) who utilized a questionnaire for determining the
professional life related stress and allied socio-demographic variables among staff nurses. The
risk for occupational stress, accredited to satisfactory and poor attitude among doctors was 4
or 3 times more, in comparison to excellent doctor attitudes. Moreover, the level of stress
was directly proportional to department such as, ICU and emergency (43%). Owing to the fact
that an estimated 42% nurses suffered from stress due to lack of rest time, it can be stated
that occupational stress affected the mental health as well. Gandi et al. (2011) also
investigated the impact of stress and burnout on the job performance of nursing staff and
suggested lack of any sex differences in levels of burnout among Nigerian nursing staff, who
are subjected to average or high levels of emotive tiredness, medium stages of
depersonalization and increased levels of personal achievement. However, no significant
differences were observed in burnout effects on men and women, owing to similar working
environment in Nigeria. Thus, the study findings suggested that demonstration of empathy
towards patients often attracted several risk factors that were responsible for the onset of
occupational stress. Teng, Hsiao and Chou (2010) stated that time pressure amid nursing staff
resulted in a reduction in the patient perceived accountability and/or reliability, assurance
and responsiveness. However, there was a failure on the part of the nurses in developing any
momentous negative connotation between tangibles and empathy, as perceived by patients,
and time pressure.
Elfering, Semmer and Grebner (2006) also proposed findings that were similar to the previous
evidences. They confirmed incorrect and incomplete documentation as the primary stressful
event faced by nurses (40.3%), followed by patient care delivery delay (9.7%), medication
error (21%), and violent patients (9.7%). Although most research evidences have determined
the risk factors that contribute to occupational stress, and its effect on physical and mental
health, there is a gap in exploring the immediate impacts that are created on occupational
performance of the nursing staff. This calls for the need of conducting further investigation
on the topic.

3LITERATURE REVIEW
Method:
Discussion:
The case study employed the use of secondary research analysis with the aim of gaining a
sound understanding of the current perspectives of researchers towards the factors that
contribute to occupational stress among nurses and their impacts. Conduction of a secondary
research facilitated searching relevant sources of scientific information for determining what
has been already explored on occupational stress among nursing professionals, and how
extensively the phenomenon under investigation has been examined. Another additional
benefit of conducting the literature review can be accredited to the fact that it helped in
identifying the particular topic related to occupational stress on which the researchers have
placed maximum focus. This helped in the discovery of new domains that required detailed
exploration, by reviewing the articles that had already been published on the topic.
Several key terms as “occupational”, “work related”, “stress”, “anxiety”, “effects”, “impacts”,
and “job performance”. These key phrases were combined with three Boolean operators
“AND”, “OR”, and “NOT”. While “AND” narrowed down the search hits to those that
contained the key phrases in the extracted texts, “OR” broadened the retrieved hits of
articles by joining two or more synonyms. The “NOT” operator excluded certain terms from
the search hits. These key phrases were entered into two electronic databases namely,
CINAHL and MEDLINE, from where the most pertinent articles that directly addressed the
research question, were extracted. The initial hits were followed by examining them for
duplicates, which when removed decreased the hits. Then the articles were examined for
their titles and abstracts. An assessment of the title facilitated exclusion of articles that were
not related to the phenomenon under investigation. The final step of methodology comprised
of determining the full-text eligibility of the scholarly literature. Thus, the aforementioned
steps helped in conducting a comprehensive literature review for drawing definite
conclusions to the problem of occupational stress among nurses.

4LITERATURE REVIEW
Conclusion:
The main findings of the review is that conflict between the patients and their family
members, opposing views with the colleagues and supervisors, uncertainty about the
therapeutic impacts of an intervention, lack of experience, workforce shortage, workload,
lack of work-personal life balance and posting in departments that are of greater importance,
are some of the major factors that play a significant role on development of occupational
stress among nursing professionals (Sarafis et al. 2016). This was found to create a
noteworthy effect on the quality of life of the nurses and also lowered the quality of care
services that were delivered to the patients. These findings were consistent with those
published by Sveinsdóttir, Biering and Ramel (2006) who affirmed the fact that strenuous
conditions were most commonly faced among hospital Icelandic nurses, when compared to
those who worked beyond hospital settings. The researchers confirmed the fact that a
shortage of staff often made it difficult for the nurses to adequately meet the needs of their
patients, thus leading to frustration regarding their incompetence, thus resulting in stress and
associated occupation-related health problems. These were also in accordance to
Farquharson et al. (2012) who opined that work–family conflict acts in the form of a
noteworthy predictor of job gratification and most often controls the intention of nursing
staff to leave their job, on being subjected to high levels of occupational stress. Presence of
conflicting situations in the workplace was also associated to illness absence, thus affirming
the fact that work related stress takes a toll on the physical and mental health. This was also
in accordance to the findings proposed by Stathopoulou et al. (2011), which elaborated on
the fact that levels of anxiety and stress are relatively greater among nursing personnel and
women who were hired by the public health hospitals (P = .029, Mann-Whitney U test). The
researchers were also able to establish a direct correlation between increased occupational
stress and duty of nurses in emergency departments. However, one major limitation is the
fact that all relevant literature on the selected topic were not considered, thus increasing
chance of biasness in the results. Hence, there is a need to conduct an extensive systematic
review in future.

5LITERATURE REVIEW
Thus, it can be concluded that occupational stress among nurses is a widespread problem.
Work related stress has been found to directly contribute to health difficulties in nursing staff
and declines their competence. The nursing occupation has been known to be taxing all over
the world and has unfavorable effects on the bodily and emotional wellbeing of a person’s
health. Work-related stress is of important concern to establishments because of the
identified hostile impacts on performance of the employees, their efficiency, job fulfilment
and wellbeing as a whole. Stress essentially involves the associations between persons and
their setting that are measured as stimulating or beyond their possessions and endangering
their wellbeing. Stress is recognized to cause expressive tiredness to nursing professional and
this hints at undesirable frame of mind toward the patients who are under their care.
Additionally the research suggested that stress has been acknowledged as one of the chief
grounds for absence from work. Worry, frustration, irritation and spirits of meagerness,
feebleness or incapacity are sentiments that are habitually concomitant with stress. Thus, if
these encounters are manifested by a nursing staff, the routine activities of day-to-day living
would be problematic to survive with. This calls for the need of implementing strategies for
reducing occupational stress among nurses.

6LITERATURE REVIEW
References
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occupational stress and its influencing factors: A qualitative study. Iranian journal of nursing
and midwifery research, 17(5), p.352.
Elfering, A., Semmer, N.K. and Grebner, S., 2006. Work stress and patient safety: observer-
rated work stressors as predictors of characteristics of safety-related events reported by
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