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DOI
https://doi.org/10.63853/WQZL9297
Description
Purpose: Pediatric critical care nurses provide essential care to severely ill or injured children, yet high stress can impact the nurse’s well-being. Although it is known that exposure to traumatic events can contribute to secondary trauma for the nurse, it is becoming more widely understood how the work environment is a contributing factor on how stress is experienced by the nurse. It is also known that emotion regulation strategies to meet organizational display rules, called emotional labor, can increase or decrease felt stress, but it is not known if this is impacted by organizational culture types. The purpose of this quantitative correlational-predictive study was to evaluate if, and to what extent, organizational culture types predict emotional regulation strategies within emotional labor, and if this predictive relationship was mediated by stress in pediatric critical care nurses. The Conservation of Resource Theory was used to guide the research questions and related hypotheses.
Methods: After IRB approval was received, recruitment began in June 2024 with the registered nurses from Transport, and the Critical Care Units and Emergency Departments in Dallas and Plano. Three validated instruments were used to collect data from 96 pediatric critical nurses, which included the Emotional Labor Scale, Perceived Stress Scale 10, and the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument. RQ1 investigated if there was a predictive total effect between the organizational culture type (collaborate, create, compete, control) and the emotional regulation strategy used in emotional labor (surface acting, deep acting, authentic display). RQ2 investigated whether the indirect effect between organizational culture type and emotional regulation strategy in emotional labor was mediated by cumulative stress. Multiple regression and mediation analysis were used to test for a direct, indirect, and total effect using bootstrapped confidence intervals at 99%.
Results: There were statistically significant relationships between organizational culture types and the emotion regulation strategy within emotional labor, but it depended on the variable. The results showed that depending on the culture type, surface acting (suppression) decreased while deep acting (reframing) increased, some of which were mediated by stress levels. Collaborate culture had a predictive relationship between surface acting, deep acting, and authentic display while stress mediated some of the effect for surface acting, and all the measured effect for authentic display. Create culture had no effect on the emotion regulation strategies in emotional labor. Compete culture had statistically significant relationships between surface acting, statistically significant relationships between surface acting, deep acting, and authentic display, with stress mediating some of this effect. These results confirm the importance of healthy work environments, and give suggestions for improvement
Publication Date
11-24-2025
Disciplines
Pediatric Nursing
Recommended Citation
Beardsley, Elaine, "Investigating the Mediated Relationship of Stress between Organizational Culture and Emotional Labor in Nurses" (2025). 2025. 31.
https://scholarlycollection.childrens.com/nursing-anf2025/31
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
