Thesis

literature, when it comes to the workplace and life satisfaction, is how to enhance life
satisfaction by changing factors at the workplace. Demerouti et al. (op. cit) suggested that a
person’s workplace is affected by life satisfaction by altering factors related to the worker or
to the working-environment. Alterations like that could for example be short-term factors
related to work, like for example changing a person’s mood, energy resources, and interests.
The mentioned alterations could also be long-term factors related to work, like for example
changing one’s skills, one’s personality or one’s health. Since burnout might be looked upon
as a long-term outcome of one’s job, burnout could be a marker of the person’s quality of
work. The researchers thus wanted to see if feelings related to work could spread out to life in
general.
In their research, Demerouti et al. (2000) showed that it was especially those nurses who
stated emotional exhaustion to a higher degree who thought their relationships with the
patients were demanding, nurses who stated that they were under severe time pressure, nurses
who experienced severe physical and mental workload, nurses reporting negative
environmental conditions, and nurses who experienced a problem with their schedule. The
researchers also found that those nurses, who stated their job demands to be high, did not
distance themselves from their hospital duties. On the contrary, distancing themselves from
work was more pronounced in those nurses who did not have access to adequate resources.
Job resources, which played a crucial part in order to predict depersonalization, were feedback
of one’s work, control over the job, diversity of the duties, supervisory support, rewards, and a
feeling of being able to take part in decisions being made. It was also found that when nurses
were experiencing a lack of job resources, they took more distance from their duties as a
nurse. In the study it was also shown that burnout played an important mediating part in the
association between job resources and life satisfaction. The researchers theorized that work-
related circumstances were influencing life satisfaction through negative health outcomes,
since they could not find a direct association between job demands and job resources, and life
satisfaction. Thus, burnout played a mediating part between work-related circumstances and
life satisfaction.
Lee, Hwang, Kim & Daly (2004) stated that when it comes to research done in the field of
nursing, researchers have focused on work stress and how nurses are responding to their
working environment, like for example level of satisfaction with the work and burnout.
However, not much attention has been paid to the field of nurses and their well-being in the