Thesis

salaries of health care system personnel, even the younger nurses today are experiencing the
results of the then harsh political situation (see Piko, 2006). Thus, if one looks at the result in
the present study, where the Hungarian nurses scored lower on psychological immunity, from
this point of view, the results might not be that surprising. The results of the personality
measure in this study might reflect the difficult history of Hungary compared to Sweden,
which did not have to go through such difficult times as Hungary. If this is the case, then it is
also interesting to note the impact of the history on this sample of Hungarian nurses and the
extent to it is still having an influence on the lives of this sample of Hungarian emergency
nurses today. Having theorized about this possible explanation for Swedish nurses having
higher psychological immunity it must however also be mentioned that more research is
needed in this area, where researchers should try to give reasons and explanations for
differences in psychological immunity between nations.
The second part of the fourth hypothesis looked at the connection between higher
psychological immunity and lower burnout scores for the Swedish nurses. The connection
between burnout and personality has been extensively investigated by other researchers and
the results have yielded mixed results. One thing the majority of them have in common
though, is the fact that they agree that personality does have an impact on burnout. The only
question is which personality type this impact can be attributed to. Maslach (1982) has
concluded that the burnout syndrome does not take place for everybody continually. There are
apparent individual differences in burnout and these individual differences seem to be
connected to differences in personality among people. Also Brewer & Shapard (2004) have
found that individual factors can be linked to burnout by specific personality characteristics.
Several other researchers have mentioned the importance impact of personality in the
development of burnout (see for example Bakker et al., 2006; Baramee & Blegen, 2003;
Harrisson et al., 2002; Houkes et al., 2003; Schmitz et al., 2000). According to these
researchers personality might offer a very important explanation of burnout.
Maslach et al. (2001) states that the area of personality in relation to burnout has been studied
in order to find which type of personality may experience burnout to a higher degree, i.e.,
which the burnout personality is. The personality types which have been linked to burnout are
for example introversion and extroversion; sensitive and idealistic persons; people who are
too enthusiastic, empathic, anxious, or obsessive traits; hardy personality; having external
locus of control; the Big Five personality dimensions like neuroticism, extraversion, openness