Introduction: One of the risk factors in terms of physical and mental suffering in a professional environment is related to the emotions generated by the work situation and to how the worker experiences these emotions (Hoschild, 1983). In the so-called contact professions, that is to say those in which workers interact with other people, professionals dealing with a public particularly a public in distress, are more exposed than others to psychosocial risk factors of an emotional nature. Among these professionals, hospital nurses rank high. Nurses are regularly confronted with the suffering of others and are thus asked to constantly display empathy towards their patients and their entourage, which generates a significant emotional burden. Thus, to manage their own emotions and those of the people with whom it is necessary to interact in a work environment, a nurse is constantly obliged to regulate the emotional charge in which they are confronted. When this emotional burden is too heavy, it becomes a psychosocial risk factor that can lead, among other things, to emotional exhaustion or to burnout. This raises the question of the influence of empathy on the risk of burnout: considered as an essential quality of the nurse, it is also a vector of emotions. As such, it can be a source of suffering for the caregiver, including emotional exhaustion or burnout. The purpose of this study was to test on the one hand the link between empathy and emotional exhaustion and on the other hand that between empathy and burnout, among nurses in French hospitals. We did not set out with a specific hypothesis concerning these links, established works on the subject present conflicting results. (Wilkinson, Whittington, Perry & Eames, 2017).
Method and participants: 316 subjects, men and women, responded to this study between February and April 2017. They were all nurses in French hospitals. Some worked in public hospitals, others in private clinics. They came from all types of services (medicine, surgery, follow-up care and rehabilitation, palliative care, psychiatry, intensive care, emergencies, geriatrics …). Some worked during the day, others at night, or both. Similarly, some were full-time and some part-time. Two scales of measurement were used: the empathy was evaluated with the Index of Personal Reactivity (IRI, Davis, 1980) and the burnout with the Burn-out Measure of Shirom and Melamed (SMBM, Shirom & Melamed , 2006). A total of 316 questionnaires, distributed over the Internet, were analysed by a correlation study between the sub-dimensions of empathy and burnout and two models of multiple standard linear regression. The first model aimed to assess the weight of each factor of empathy in the overall level of burn-out in the nurse. The second model focused on the weight of each factor of empathy in the emotional exhaustion of the nurse, as a central component of burnout.Results: The results revealed the importance of the emotional component of empathy in emotional exhaustion and burnout in general among French hospital nurses.More specifically, it is personal distress that has the greatest impact on the overall level of burnout (β = .261, p <.001) and emotional exhaustion (β = .217, p <.001). Personal distress refers to the nurse’s tendency to feel the distress of others and therefore to be anxious about the negative experiences experienced by them (eg. in emergency situations, I am worried and uncomfortable). Emotional exhaustion refers to the difficulty of regulating emotions (eg. I feel unable to feel the needs of my colleagues and / or patients). Unlike personal distress, empathic concern, which involves developing compassion or sympathy for individuals less fortunate than oneself (eg, I often feel tenderness for the less fortunate), seems to protect against emotional exhaustion. In terms of weight, empathic concern is the second factor influencing emotional exhaustion (β = -203, p <.001), after personal distress (β = .217, p <.001).Conversely, the cognitive component of empathy, referring to the tendency of an individual to adopt an external point of view (eg I sometimes find it difficult to see things from somebody else’s point of view ), was found to be unrelated to the nurse’s burn-out level.Discussion: A high level of empathy can protect against the development of burnout. Therefore, teaching empathy could be an important feature of interventions to reduce burnout.From an organisational point of view, working on empathy and burnout within hospital structures could have a positive economic impact, considering that psychosocial risks generate absenteeism, itself an origin of organisational dysfunctions, implying a decrease of productivity, associated with a material, human and financial cost for the organisations and for society in general.
Keywords: nurse, psychosocial risks, emotional demands, empathy, burnout, emotional exhaustion.
The term “nurse” is understood in the general sense. Similarly, the terms “burnout” and ” “professional exhaustion” will be considered synonymous unless otherwise stated by the author.
My name is Sonia. I come from the University of Nantes. Two main fields of intervention interest me in work psychology: psychosocial risks and the general workplace clinic, on the one hand, and psychosocial intervention on the other hand. Moreover, I would like to work mainly with institutions of care or medico-social