Nuances of COVID-19 and Psychosocial Work Environment on Nurses’ Wellbeing: The Mediating Role of Stress and Eustress in Lieu to JD-R Theory

BACKGROUND: The global spread of COVID-19 makes Pakistan as vulnerable as any other developing country and the risk posed by the weak health system increases the fears in people’s minds. The government is strategically expanding the scope of community ownership and increasing understanding in the population through risk communication and engagement; still, the situation remains very austere and is even affecting the psychological health of caregivers. We, therefore, sought to determine the impact of psychosocial job demands and resources associated with the psychological health of nurses in a time lag duration of 3 months, i.e., since the start of the pandemic, from January to March 2020. We hypothesized the significant mediating roles of stress and eustress in a direct relationship with psychosocial work environment job demands, job resources, and nurses’ wellbeing. METHODS: In this cross-sectional self-administrated study, we distributed the survey in two parts by using a time-lag strategy to collect data at the start of pandemic (Time 1) and then again 3 months later (Time 2). Data on 53 items was collected from 208 female nurses who had participated in both the time phases and met the eligibility protocols of the study (such as being certified female nurses who have a registration number (RN) through the Pakistan Nursing Council (PNC), having 4 years of a generic nursing degree, and 2 years of nursing experience). FINDINGS: We have achieved three stages through our analytic study on the nurses’ samples to determine the predictive abilities for the quality of the psychosocial work environment model. The coefficient of determination is R2, while the effect size is f2. We found 29.0% variance, 0.05 and 0.03 effect size, and 0.153 predictive abilities on stress as explained by job demands, and 53.4% variance, 0.19 and 0.39 effect size, and 0.275 predictive abilities on eustress as explained by job resources. And finally, there was 71.2% variance, 0.00, 0.02, 0.02, 0.03, 0.42, and 0.07 effect sizes, and 0.545 predictive abilities on our third endogenous construct, wellbeing, which is explained by both the psychosocial job demands and job resource variables. From partial to full mediation, stress and eustress significantly impact the psychosocial work environment of nurses.