Predicting Job Burnout Based on The Meaning in Life and Emotion Regulation in Psychiatric Hospital Staff

The job burnout experience in hospital staff reduces their services quality to patients and society in addition to threating the health of themselves. The purpose of this research is to predict job burnout based on the meaning in life and emotion regulation in hospital staff of Zanjan city.

This descriptive-correlation study was conducted in 2022 on 110 employees of one of the hospitals in Zanjan. Data were gathered by Maslesh's job burnout, Grass's emotion regulation, and Steger's meaning in life questionnaires. Statistical analysis of data was done with Pearson's correlation test and stepwise regression.

There is a significant relationship between job burnout, meaning in life and emotion regulation (p<0.01). In addition, the meaning in life is a stronger predictor (with a coefficient of -0.537) for job burnout. This variable alone predicts 28% of the variance of burnout (p<0.001). In the second step of the analysis, the emotion regulation variable increased the prediction power to 32.6% (p<0.001).

According to the findings, the effect of the life meaning on job burnout is more than emotion regulation. This article indicates that the meaning in life is one of the important concepts in job burnout, but in researches, less attention has been paid to it. However, it may be possible to prevent or reduce burnout by taking advantages of the positive consequences of meaning in life (presence or search).