Dentists’ work stress and doctor-patient relationship: A moderated mediation model of emotional labour, emotional intelligence and empathy

• Autor(a) principal: Wen Ping
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/28568
• topic: Dentists; Work stress; Doctor-patient relationship in China; Emotional intelligence; Empathy; Dentistas; Stresse no trabalho; Relação médico-paciente na China; Trabalho emocional -- Emotional work; Inteligência emocional; Empatia

Dentist is a profession characterised by much work stress and emotional labour, and Chinese dentists are faced with medical disputes and deteriorating doctor-patient relationships (DPRs). Guided by Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Model and Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory, this study aims to analyse the impact of work stress on DPR among dentists and the roles of emotional labour, emotional intelligence and empathy in the effect of work stress on DPR. Using a sample of 239 collected with self-reported questionnaire survey from dentists in seven hospitals in Shenzhen, China, the hypothesised model is tested with the method of PROCESS macro. The study reveals the following results: 1) surface acting and deep acting fully mediate the relationship between work stress and DPR; 2) emotional intelligence attenuates the relationship between work stress and surface acting such that work stress is less positively related to surface acting among dentists with high emotional intelligence than those with low emotional intelligence; 3) empathy attenuates the relationship between surface acting/deep acting and DPR such that the effect of surface acting/deep acting on DPR decreases as empathy increases within a certain range; 4) surface acting fully mediates the relationships between each of the four aspects of work stress (work, patient, competency and colleague) and DPR, and this mediating effect is moderated by empathy; deep acting only fully mediates the relationship between patients-related work stress and DPR, and such mediating effect is moderated by emotional intelligence and empathy.