Investigating the Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Social Support with Burnout in Nurses in Intensive Care Units

Since job burnout affects the patientschr('39') quality of care, it is useful to identify more effective factors in improving the quality of services. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between emotional intelligence and social support with job burnout among nurses.

This was a descriptive and cross-sectional study conducted in the winter of 2018. The research population included 214 nurses of intensive care units in the medical and educational center of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences by census sampling method. Data were gathered using Bradbury and Graveschr('39') social intelligence, Philips et al.’s social support, and Maslach and Jackson’s burnout questionnaires. For analyzing the research hypotheses, Pearson correlation, linear regression, and Sobel test were used.   

Two of the nurses exhibited low emotional intelligence (%0.93), while two of them had average (%0.93) and 210 had high emotional intelligence (%98.13). 18.22% had low burnout, 73.36% had average and 8.41% had high burnout rate. The correlation between emotional intelligence with social support was 0.125, and the probability was greater than 0.05. The correlation between emotional exhaustion and perceived social support, personality deprivation, individual performance, and job burnout were found to be 0.012, 0.07, -0.045, and 0.015, respectively; whereas probability values for all of these relationships were more than 0.05. The correlation between emotional intelligence and emotional exhaustion, personality deprivation, individual function, and burnout were -0.263, -0.125, -0.313, and -0.335, respectively. The probability values except for the personchr('39')s depersonalization variable, for other relationships, were also less than 0.05, and the relationship was documented to be significant.

There was a significant and inverse relationship between emotional intelligence and job burnout, but there was found not a significant relationship between social support with job burnout, and emotional intelligence with social support.