Emotional Labor in Healthcare Staff, Analysis of Burnout and Job Satisfaction Relationship: An Application in the Province of Konya

Today, with the increase in the importance of the service sector, the ability to compete has also become important for the companies active in this area. Thus, emotional efforts and drives of the human resources especially in occupations with intense face to face communication, in other words the emotional labors, have become important for the companies which want to be successful in the environment of competition, as well as the physical and mental efforts of human resources. Especially in occupations where face-to-face communication is intense, such as the health sector, the emotional efforts and efforts of human resources, that is, emotional labor, are an important factor in achieving success.Considering that the health workers, who are in face to face interaction with people constantly and who have to show more than one emotion in this process by their job definition, may experience exhaustion during these behaviors and their job satisfaction may be affected by this; it was aimed in this study to examine the relationship of the emotional labors behaviors of health workers with exhaustion and job satisfaction.In the study devised with this purpose, the study group comprised the health workers in a public, private and a university hospital in Konya. After required permissions were obtained from related institutions, data were collected using the information form, emotional labor scale, exhaustion scale and job satisfaction scale prepared by the researcher in which the personal (age,gender,marital statüs, education level) and occupational properties (occupation, income, type of employment, institution of employment, year of work) of the health workers were examined. Verbal approvals were taken from the workers for the questionnaire and the data were assessed from 381 valid questionnaires. In the analysis of valid data, it was seen there was no difference between the emotional labor of health workers and gender, age, monthly income, occupation, type of employment and duration of duty in the institution. In addition, emotional labor behaviors of health workers differ according to the educational status, marital status, institution and occupational experiences.As a result of the analyses conducted to examine the relationship between emotional labor and burnout and job satisfaction, health workers use the expression of natural emotions from the emotional labor behaviours by the definition of the service. In this context, a conclusion has been reached, contrary to the view that emotional labor, which is generally studied in sectors other than health sector, causes burnout and reduces job satisfaction.