Workplace violence, psychosocial safety climate and their impacts on mental and self-rated health: A mixed-method study among nurses
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Pien, Li-Chung
Abstract
Workplace violence has been recognized as a serious psychosocial work hazard in many countries. In addition to physical and mental health consequences, workers who experience workplace violence often encounter various forms of hardships, including interpersonal conflicts, employee-employer conflicts and/or legal dispute with employers or customer. Victims of workplace violence might experience further physical and meantl health impacts if their work environment failed to act supportively after the violent event or if the legal protection provision was fragmented. There were three study objectives: First, in-depth interviews with nurses who had experienced workplace violence were conducted to understand nurses’experiences in the notification and appealing processes and their perception of hospital’s responses toward workplace violence. Secondly, a survey of nurses was conducted to examine the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of psychosocial safety climate (PSC-12C). Thirdly, a cross-sectional survey was conducted to examine the associations of organizational psychosocial safety climate and mental and self-rated health status among nurses. Methods: Mixed-methods were used in this study. For the first objective, in-depth interviews were conducted with 17 female nurses. For the second objective, the PSC-12C was Translated and back-translated to ensure valid translation, following by a survey of 408 nurses to examine its internal consistency reliability, construct validity, convergent validity and discriminant validity. For the third objective, a cross-sectional survey of 1853 nurses and 75 occupational safety and health personnel from 75 hospitals was conducted. A standardized questionnaire was used to obtain information regarding the experiences of workplace violence over the previous 12 months. Organizational climate was measured by the PSC-12C and mental health status was measured by the Brief Symptom Rating Scale (BSRS-5). Also obtained were participants’ age, seniority, educational level, and work characteristics. Results: Results from the the qualitative study showed that a majority of nurses experienced poor health after violent events. Those who suffered internal workplace violence reported poor organizational climate. Most of the interviewees perceived low levels of psychosocial safety climate, and considered their work organization not supportive and processes not transparent to workers in issues of workplace violence. The validity study showed that the PSC-12C had a Cronbach’s αlevel of 0.83 and good construct validity, convergent validity and discriminant validity. Results from the survey study showed that night or rotating shifts, heavy workloads, low workplace justice and low PSC were found to be risk factors for workplace violence. After controlling for educational level and work characteristics, nurses who had experienced workplace violence over the previous 12 months were at a higher risk for poor mental health (OR=1.507) and poor self-rated health (OR=1.840). When further adjusted for the experience of workplace violence, lower PSC was associated with increased risks for poor self-rated health. Conclusion: Study findings showed that nurses with workplace violence experiencemultiple hardships, and there is much room for imrprovement in the prevention of workplace violence and protection of affected workers. The PSC-12C was found to have good reliability and validity and can be applied to other studies. We suggest that organizational climate should be improved to prevent workplace violence and to promote workers’ physical and mental health wellbeing.
Subjects
workplace violence
psychosocial safety climate
hierarchical linear and nonlinear modeling
mental health
self-rated health
Type
thesis
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