The personality of newly graduated and employed nurses: Temperament and character profiles of Swedish nurses

Background

One of the challenges of the 21st century is the high turnover rate in the nursing profession due to burnout and mental illness. From a biopsychosocial perspective, an individual's personality is an important vulnerability-resilience factor that comprises four temperament traits (i.e., a person's emotional reactions) and three character traits (i.e., self-regulation systems). Indeed, different personality profiles are associated to different coping strategies and health outcomes.

Objective

We investigated and mapped the temperament and character of Swedish newly graduated and employed nurses' in relation to the Swedish general population and an age-matched sub-sample.

Design

In this cross-sectional study, nurses self-reported their personality (Temperament and Character Inventory) at the beginning of their employment.

Setting

The data collection was conducted at a hospital in the South of Sweden.

Participants

A total of 118 newly graduated and employed nurses (Mage = 25.95±5.58) and 1,564 individuals from the Swedish general population participated in the study.

Methods

We calculated T-scores and percentiles for all seven personality dimensions using the Swedish norms (N = 1,564). The profiles were calculated by combining high/low percentiles scores in three temperament dimensions (Novelty Seeking: N/n, Harm Avoidance: H/h, and Reward Dependence: R/r) and in the three character dimensions (Self-Directedness: S/s, Cooperativeness: C/c and Self-Transcendence: T/t).

Results

Regarding T-scores, the nurses reported moderately lower Novelty Seeking (> 0.5 SD), slightly higher Harm-Avoidance (about 0.5 SD), moderately higher Persistence (> 0.5 SD) and Reward Dependence (> 0.5 SD), and extremely lower Self-Directedness (> 1 SD). The prevalence of the most common temperament profiles among the nurses (Swedish general population in brackets) were: 39.80% [10.90%] Cautious (nHR), 21.20% [10.90] Reliable (nhR), and 15.30% [16.50%] Methodical (nHr). The prevalence of the most common character profiles among the nurses were: 31.40% [4.90%] Dependent (sCt), 25.40% [14.40%] Apathetic (sct), and 19.50% [8.80%] Moody (sCT).

Conclusions

The analyses of the personality profiles showed that Low Novelty Seeking (79%), high Harm Avoidance (65%) high Reward Dependence (80%), low Self-Directedness (95%), and low Self-Transcendence (60%) were more prevalent among the newly graduated and employed nurses. This may partially explain newly graduated nurses' difficulties at work and high turnover rate. After all, a well-developed character is of special importance when working with patients with serious and terminal illness or under large global crises, such as the current pandemic. Hence, both education at universities and development at work need to be person-centered to reduce stress levels and promote positive self-regulation strategies.

Creative utterances about person-centered care among future health care professionals are related to reward dependence rather than to a creative personality profile

Background

Creativity can be defined as the creation of something that is novel, useful, and valuable for society (i.e., high-level creativity) and/or everyday life. In this context, people have implicit theories of creativity as being either non-malleable (i.e., a fixed creative mindset) or malleable (i.e., a growth creative mindset). Our aim was twofold: (1) to test an improved creative mindset priming paradigm (i.e., adding high-level/everyday creativity perspectives and using an organizational important task) by assessing if participants used different ways to answer to the prime and (2) to analyse the relationship between personality and creative utterances regarding an important topic in participants' future professions.

Method

Students (N = 73) from different health care professions were randomly assigned to the non-malleable or malleable creative mindset priming paradigm (i.e., fixed vs. growth) and then asked to write about (a) their own creativity, (b) person-centered care in their professions (i.e., unusual use test), and to (c) self-rate their personality (Temperament and Character Inventory). We used natural language processing methods (i.e., Latent Semantic Algorithm) to analyse participants' responses in the different conditions and also responses in relation to self-reported personality.

Results

The fixed versus growth condition was predicted (r = .55, p < 0.0001), following Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons by participants' descriptions about creativity. Although the condition was not predicted (r = .07, p < 0.2755) by participants' utterances about person-centered care, a t-test suggested that participants used words that were semantically different depending on the condition they were randomly assigned to (t(2371) = 5.82, p = .0000). For instance, participants in the growth condition used verbs more frequently, while those in the fixed condition used the personal pronoun I more often. Finally, only the temperament trait of reward dependence (r = .32, p < 0.01) predicted the person-centered care utterances.

Conclusion

We argue that the paradigm successfully primed participants to write about creativity and person-centered care using narratives with different semantic content. However, individuals' ambition to be socially accepted, rather than creative personality traits, elicited the utterances about person-centered care. The creative mindset priming paradigm presented here along language processing methods might be useful for measuring creative potential at work. We suggest that if health care personnel's notions of the activities related to care are generated from their drive to be socially accepted and not from a truly creative profile, the activities might be self-serving and not person-centered.

The Swedish version of the Regulatory Mode Questionnaire

The data include responses to the Swedish version of a questionnaire used to operationalize self-regulation or regulatory mode: assessment and locomotion. The data was collected among 567 Swedish high school and university students (see Garcia and Lindskär, 2016 [1]). In this article, we also include the Swedish version of the Regulatory Mode Questionnaire. The data is available, SPSS file, as supplementary material in this article.