Thesis

chance of getting away from a stressful situation, or when someone is given responsibility she
cannot cope with. A lack of sense of control concerning ones work situation can make a nurse
feel frustrated, angry, ineffective and unsuccessful.
Maslach (1982) is further saying that burnout can also occur in connection to a nurse’s
colleagues. A nurse has to have a healthy relationship with her colleagues; otherwise this
relationship might be a source of negative emotions for the nurse. Thus, the relationship with
colleagues can sometimes be more stressful than the relationship with patients. This
relationship can contribute to burnout in two different ways. One of the ways is that the
colleagues serve another basis of emotional stress which can lead to the development of
emotional exhaustion and negative feelings concerning people. The second way is that the
colleagues take away an important resource for the nurse to be able to cope with and to
prevent burnout. Just as the relationship with the colleagues is very important for the nurse to
have a healthy working relationship with, also the relationship with the supervisors is very
important since the nurse also has to deal with them on a daily basis. If this relationship is not
working properly, the nurse might feel tension and negative emotions which add to the
emotional overload of the work itself.
Just like Maslach (1982) mentioned, also according to Maslach et al. (2001) when it comes to
job characteristics and more specifically quantitative job demands (like for example too many
tasks in relation to time available to carry them out) they have been looked into by a variety of
researchers and the findings from these researches have shown that overload can cause
burnout. Both workload and time pressure have been significantly connected to burnout,
especially to emotional exhaustion. This result have been reported for self-reports of how
much strain a nurse is experiencing and for more objective measures of work demands, like
for example how many hours a nurse is working and how many patients she has to take care
of. Just like Brewer & Shapard (2004), Maslach et al. (2001) also looked at role conflict and
role ambiguity. Both of these variables have shown to be moderately and highly connected to
burnout. Role conflict takes place when a nurse has to carry out contradictory demands at her
workplace and role ambiguity takes place when a nurse does not get enough information
regarding how to carry out her job in a good way. Another topic which has been studied in
relation to job characteristics is not only job demands but also the lack of job resources. In
connection to this, the topic which has been looked into most is social support. There is today
a mutual understanding among researchers that a lack of social support can be connected to