Thesis

Simoni & Paterson (1997) have also reported about findings on personality associated with
burnout. More specifically they reported about intensive care unit nursing burnout compared
to nurses working in non-intensive care units and hardy personality. They found that it was
hardiness and not specific work-related stressors which accounted for significant associations
with burnout in the intensive care and non-intensive care unit nurses. Nurses working in both
wards who reported lower burnout scores consequently reported higher hardiness scores.
Simoni & Paterson (op. cit.) also conducted another research which looked at burnout in
geriatric nurses and psychosocial factors in association with it. This research found that hardy
personality was the single most significant predictor of burnout. In a different study conducted
by Simoni & Paterson (op. cit.) with 529 nurses, they looked at the associations between
hardiness, burnout, and direct-active coping. In this study it was shown that no matter which
coping strategy the nurses used, the nurses who had higher hardiness scores accounted for
decreased stress and decreased burnout scores, than did the nurses who had lower hardiness
scores.
Browning, Ryan, Greenberg & Rolniak (2006) looked into the role of personality in
connection to potential burnout, by looking at cognitive adaptation disposition such as
mastery, optimism, and self-esteem. The researchers predicted that nurses with stronger
cognitive adaptation disposition could keep their expectations to a higher degree and therefore
experience burnout to a less degree. They included 300 nurses in their cross-sectional research
and they defined the potential burnout by looking at the control over work variable. The
researchers found a positive association between burnout and perceived loss of control. When
it comes to the researchers expectations of cognitive adaptation it was also found to be
supported. More specifically, Browning et al. (op. cit.) found that cognitive adaptation was
related to lower burnout scores, i.e., decreased emotional exhaustion and depersonalization,
and increased personal accomplishment without any connection to the nurses’ original
expected perceived control. Also, the results showed that cognitive adaptation in its general
form was connected to increases in present expectations and as such decreased levels of not
met control expectations. All of these results were shown to be independent of the years
working as a nurse and which specialization the nurse had. On the other hand, mastery was
shown to offer buffering against burnout in part of the researchers result. Thus, mastery had a
buffering effect on increased perceived original expectations in relation to present
expectations and as such on not met control expectations more precisely. Furthermore,
mastery also served as a buffering effect on increased originally perceived control