Thesis

(op. cit.) also reported that the nurses in his sample felt that many of the times the family of
the patient would exhibit too high demands about a patient’s treatment without having the
medical background to do so. The families sometimes would have requirements which the
nurses felt they were not able to meet and that a lack of understanding from the family made
the nurses work much more difficult. The Swedish and Hungarian nurses in the present study
could not express such a detailed explanation in relation to relationship with the patient’s
relatives since the present study was a quantitative one using a questionnaire, however they
did express the relationship with the patient’s relatives to cause emotional exhaustion and thus
making their work much more difficult. In the present study it was found that personal
accomplishment could not be associated with work stress for either the Swedish or the
Hungarian nurses. This was an interesting finding which has also been confirmed by Garrosa
et al. (2006) who stated that when looking at a lack of personal accomplishment, they could
not find significant associations between this dimension and workload. Garrosa et al. (op. cit.)
could not find an association between personal accomplishment and specifically workload;
however the present study failed to find a connection between personal accomplishment and
work-related stress in general. Even though, previous research gives an indication of personal
accomplishment maybe having a minor connection to work-related stress, and maybe
especially workload. The situation seems to be different for emotional exhaustion, where
Garrosa et al. (op. cit.) found that it was the emotional exhaustion dimension which had the
main amount of explained variance in relation to work stressors. This holds true also for the
present study, where it was shown that emotional exhaustion was the most sensitive to the
work stress factors in both the Swedish and Hungarian nurses. Other researchers have also
found emotional exhaustion to be highly related to work-related stress factors (see for
example Cherniss, 1980; Lindblom et al., 2006; Maslach & Jackson, 1981; Posig & Kickul,
2003). Overall, it seems like work-related factors have a significant connection to burnout in
the present study and also in previous studies, and it has been shown by Garrosa et al. (2006)
that approximately 20% of the three dimensions of the burnout were explained by the work
stressors in their study.