Thesis

elated to stress levels and job satisfaction. The nurses stress levels could be significantly
predicted by their ideas of their conditions at work, where time pressure played a significant
role for having negative results. Nurses experienced stress in relation to how much their work
interfered with their private life and how much workload was making it impossible for them
to perform their job according to one’s values. The nurses in this sample reported that their
job satisfaction was related to having good management and having enough resources. These
researchers’ study did not show that nurses emotional contacts with patients was the major
source of stress for them and even though this variable was mentioned by the nurses as the
mostly common stress factor, it was still not the one variable which caused stress in general
for these nurses.
When it comes to research connected to work stress, burnout and nurses, there have been
many studies conducted in identifying the difficult aspects of nurses’ work and how the
nurses’ are coping with these demands. Work stress is recognized today as being present at a
nurse workplace, especially after the early works of Michaels (1971) and Parkes (1980).
These researchers recognized the impact of the work stress for nurses and also looked into its
international occurrence (Macintosh, 2007). Looking at international studies about nurses and
burnout, Allen et al. (2002) looked at Canadian hospital nurses and their workload, and found
that heavy workloads predicted burnout. Allen et al. (op. cit) also looked at burnout in
Australian nurses and found that burnout could be connected to hospital restructuring and the
level of communication from administrators. Chang, Bidewell, Huntington, Daly, Johnson et
al. (2007) conducted a research about nurses working in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and
America to see if nurses who are working in different countries were experiencing stress
related to comparable sources at their workplaces. Some similarities were found across the
countries, for example that nurses experienced stress from excessive workload, however there
were also some dissimilarities between the countries. Garrosa, Moreno-Jimenez, Liang &
Gonzalez (2006) looked into the work stress in Swedish nurses and he found that 80% of his
sample of nurses were experiencing high or very high levels of work-related stress and these
levels of stress could be connected to burnout in those nurses.