CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
5.3 Implications for Practice
Considering the pattern of evidence from this study, it may be beneficial for human resources and nursing managers to pay attention to PsyCap, as well as the independent variables (i.e., challenges, hindrances, and resources) of the JD-R model to deal with the Thai nurses’ well-being (i.e., decreasing burnout and increasing work engagement).
First, in comparison with the independent variables (i.e., challenge demands, hindrance demands, and job resources) of the JD-R model, PsyCap is a stronger predictor of Thai nurse well-being (i.e., engagement and burnout) as evidenced by the results of PsyCap-as-a-moderator and PsyCap-as-an-antecedent models. Specifically, according to the former model, PsyCap was a full mediator between challenge demands and job resources, on the one hand, and work engagement and burnout, on the other.
These results demonstrated that without PsyCap, those work environments could not affect the nurses’ burnout and engagement. According to the latter model, challenge demands and job resources lost their direct effects on engagement and burnout when PsyCap was put into the model. In addition, the direct effects of PsyCap on work outcomes were higher than those of the work environments on the outcomes. These obviously indicated that PsyCap could influence the outcomes better than the work
conditions. Furthermore, according to PsyCap-as-a-moderator model, nurses who already were efficacious, optimistic, resilient, and hopeful, could highly engage in their work no matter the extent to which job resources were provided with. All of these emphasize the crucially important value of PsyCap on the nurses’ work environments and the work outcomes.
Consequently, to promote the well-being (i.e., less burnout and more engagement) and work achievement of nurses, private hospitals should firstly pay most attention to nurses’ PsyCap. In this regards, human resources department could use the PCQ to assess the level of PsyCap of nurses during the recruitment process and employ nurses who have high PsyCap because they tend to have higher work engagement and lower burnout. However, Thailand has been experiencing the shortage of nurses for decades and there has been a high demand for nurses in Thai hospitals so hospitals might not be able to recruit only high PsyCap candidates. Consequently, the more possible practice would be to develop the level of PsyCap of the remaining nurses by providing nurses with an adequate work environment which allows PsyCap to grow (i.e., challenge demands and job resources), or with a counseling program (see Chaleoykitti, 2014), and a training program (see F. Luthans et al., 2006) tailored to the development of PsyCap.
Second, according to the models with PsyCap as a mediator and an antecedent, hindrance demands were the variable that was significantly inferior to PsyCap to reduce burnout and encourage engagement. Consequently, if private hospitals were dealing with the issues of the nursing well-being and could not handle anything with nurses’
PsyCap, the second priority of those hospitals would be to decrease hindrance demands.
Third, the challenge-hindrance demands scale development went some way towards enhancing our understanding of the real nature of the challenge and hindrance demands. Specifically, this work has shown that most work aspects could be interpreted as both challenges and hindrances at the same time. Therefore, the new scale enlightens practitioners two ways to deal with hindrance demands in order to decrease burnout and increase work engagement. First, this study revealed that job stresses which nurses perceived as more threatening were rotational shiftwork, uncooperative doctors, incompetent nurses, unfairness, conflicts in a hospital, and the risk of injury (see
Appendix C). HR department and nurse managers could help nurses to reduce the direct experiences towards this type of demands. For instance, rotating competent nurses having a conflict with a physician to another department or new work environments.
Second, the hospital could reduce the negative perception of nurses towards each demand. In this regards, hospitals might provide nurses with training programs (such as positive thinking) aiming to adjust the cognitive process of nurses to consider work environments to be less negative or threatening.
In addition, challenge demands seem to be the least important work environment that affects the welfare of nurses. However, challenge demands could still positively and negatively influenced work engagement and burnout respectively, through PsyCap. Consequently, challenge demands are worth utilizing. HR department and nurse managers could make use of the knowledge of the scale to utilize challenge demands in such a way that was previously described – (a) to directly deal with the job demands by increasing the experiences of nurse towards job stresses perceived as more challenging which were job complexity, job variety, heavy workloads, time pressure, problematic patients, and problematic relatives (See Appendix C); and (b) to increase the positive perception of nurses towards each demand.
Fourth, job resources were the variable that was significantly inferior to PsyCap and hindrance demands that hospitals should focus on in order to manage the nurses’
burnout and engagement. Job resources were found influencing engagement directly and indirectly via PsyCap and could explain the variance of PsyCap better than the other two work conditions. Consequently, if the development of nurses’ PsyCap and the intervention of hindrance demands were inaccessible, it would be beneficial for human resources and nurse managers to provide nurses at all levels with sufficiently crucial job resources. According to the validation of the job resources scale, the most important factor of the scale that highly influenced nurses’ burnout and engagement was organizational support. Consequently, HR managers should ensure that the direct support from hospitals, such as equipment, training, rules and standards, and fair career opportunities, are made readily available for nurses.