Mediating Effects of Emotional Labor on the Relationship between Perceived Culture Discrepancies and Stress Levels in Pediatric Nurses

Background Pediatric critical care nurses provide advanced care for their patients and their families but are exposed to high levels of stress. Organizational cultures can help mitigate stress if individual values align with the behaviors within the culture, but if misaligned, they can increase stress. Although there has been extensive research on the impact of the emotion regulation strategies in emotional labor, it is not known if the relationship between organizational culture value differences and stress is mediated by the different emotional regulation strategies within emotional labor for pediatric critical care nurses. Methods Using the Conservation of Resources Theory, a non-experimental mediation analysis was conducted using 96 pediatric critical care nurses from a large pediatric trauma center in the Southern United States. The emotional labor dimensions of surface acting, deep acting, and authentic display were tested as parallel mediators for differences between preferred and current collaborate, create, control, and compete cultures and stress. Results The results showed that surface-acting and deep-acting dimensions of emotional labor mediated the relationship between the differences in preferred and current collaborative culture and stress, p  < .001, R ²  = .201. Similarly, emotional labor dimensions of surface acting and deep acting also mediated the relationship between differences in preferred and current compete culture and stress, p  < .001, R ²  = .180. No effects were observed for emotional labor as a mediator of preferred-versus-current differences in create or control cultures with stress. Conclusion Pediatric critical care nurses prefer organizational cultures that are collaborative and have elements of control, while compete and create cultures were least preferred. Pediatric organizational leaders should foster value alignment with behavior expectations. Future research should investigate interventions designed to minimize surface acting while promoting deep acting.