Linking personal bullying with nursing staff turnover intentions: A mixed methods study of public sector hospitals in Pakistan.

Abstract

The most important objective of the present research study was to test the relationship between personal bullying (PB) incidents and nursing staff turnover intentions (TI) in the major public sector hospitals of Pakistan. In addition, the role of job stress (JS) as mediating and political skill (PS) as moderating variable were also assessed in the present study. In present study, we used explanatory sequential mixed methods research design. Explanatory sequential research has two phases, quantitative followed by qualitative. In Phase 1, data was collected from 324 nurses through questionnaire and model was tested using Partial Least Squares (PLS). In phase 2, for qualitative part, 11 nurses were interviewed so that they can explain results in more detail. Results from the quantitative survey and qualitative part showed that there is a significant positive association between personal bullying and nursing staff turnover intentions and the link between personal bullying and turnover intentions was partially mediated by job stress. Furthermore, political skill (PS) weakens the relationship between personal bullying (PB) and job stress (JS). The most important limitations of the present study were the sample used, which was from six public sector hospitals of Islamabad/Rawalpindi area. The present study is the first to use a sequential explanatory mixed methods design to assess the mediating role of job stress (JS) as well as to examine the moderating effect of political skill between personal bullying and job stress linkage.