Psychological capital as moderator of organizational change demands on nursing stress

Healthcare organizations in all OECD countries have continued to undergo change. These changes have been found to have a negative effect on work engagement of nursing staff. While the extent to which nursing staff dealt with these changes has been documented in the literature, little is known of how they utilized their personal resources to deal with the consequences of these changes. This study will address this gap by integrating the Job Demands-Resources theoretical perspective with Positive Psychology, in particular, psychological capital (PsyCap). PsyCap is operationalized as a source of personal resources. Data were collected from 401 nurses from Australia and analyses were undertaken using Partial Least Squares modelling and moderation analysis. Two types of changes on the nursing work were identified. There was an increase in changes to the work environment of nursing. These changes, included increasing administrative workload and the amount of work, resulted in more job demands and job resources. On the other hand, another type of changes relate to reduction to training and management support, which resulted in less job demands. Nurses with more job demands utilized more job resources to address these increasing demands. We found PsyCap to be a crucial source of personal resources that has a moderating effect on the negative effects of job demands and role stress. PsyCap and job resources were both critical in enhancing the work engagement of nurses, as they encountered changes to nursing work. These findings provided empirical support for a positive psychological perspective of understanding nursing engagement.