An Investigation of the Personality Traits, Emotional Intelligence, Coping Behavior, and Job Stress Among Preceptors

Purpose: Preceptors play a critical role in onboarding new nurses. They build a bridge for new nurses to adapt to the working environment and play an important role in education, inspiration, and consultation. Moreover, they are heavily burdened with teaching responsibilities and are responsible for quality of care. Preceptors who are under such great stress are likely to experience burnout, leading to poor work performance and teaching quality, and job satisfaction. The purpose of this study was to investigate the correlations among personality traits, emotional intelligence, coping behavior, and job stress of preceptors.

Methods: A descriptive correlational design was used, and a purposive sample of 200 preceptors from a medical center, a regional hospital, and a district hospital located in Tainan City was recruited for this study. The instruments included the Personality Trait Scale, Emotional Intelligence Scale, Coping Behavior Inventory, and Job Stress Scale. Descriptive statistics, chi-square test, and stepwise multiple regression analysis were conducted to analyze the data using SPSS for Windows 19.0.

Results: There were significant differences in job stress in terms of the personality traits of neuroticism and conscientiousness, the emotional intelligences of use of emotion to facilitate performance and regulation of emotion in the self, and the coping behavior of emotion-focused coping. The demographic variables including education level and precepting experience, emotional intelligences of regulation of emotion in the self and use of emotion to facilitate performance, personality traits of neuroticism, openness, and agreeableness, and coping behavior of emotion-focused coping were important predictors of the job stress among preceptors.

Conclusion: The results of this study could serve as a reference for healthcare managers in cultivating talent. We expect that the results will make a significant contribution to the improvement of talent retention, thereby facilitating the retention of preceptors and improving the quality of nursing care and teaching quality, as well as Increase job satisfaction

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