Ill-treatment and working the night shift increases nurse turnover

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-11/i-iaw110616.php

Public Release: 6-Nov-2016
Ill-treatment and working the night shift increases nurse turnover
Personal interventions and team-building initiatives from management can reduce the intention of employees to quit
INSEAD

Workplace incivility, characterised by subtle forms of mistreatment (such as a dismissive gesture, raised voices or harsh words) can lead to lower job satisfaction, psychological stress, and a decline in physical health. These negative effects eventually result in higher employee turnover.

Workplaces where stress levels already run high are especially sensitive to incivility (because employees' emotional resources are highly taxed to begin with). And since high-stress environments tend also to be high-stakes, incivility could be at the heart of some very costly, even tragic mistakes.

This is particularly worrisome for organisations that have employees working in shifts, such as manufacturing firms, police departments and hospitals. Nowhere are the stakes higher than in hospitals with many countries facing nursing shortages. Retention has become an urgent issue. If incivility were to cause nurses to leave the profession, patients at the affected hospitals would bear the brunt.

Incivility is especially difficult to weed out of the workplace because it may be difficult for employees to even describe or articulate to Human Resources. But in his recent paper in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, Curtailing the harmful effects of workplace incivility: The role of structural demands and organization-provided resources, INSEAD Professor of Strategic Management, Quy Huy and his colleagues find that there are ways such incivility can be moderated.

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