How increased job demand affects nurses' task mastery and deviance in the pandemic era

Although normative and ethical procedures are extremely critical for health care providers, during this unique time, when the pandemic suddenly increased job requirements and workloads, maintaining a morally appropriate working style became an increasingly difficult challenge for nurses. Few previous studies have examined whether these highly increased job demands influence nurses' resource condition, in turn affecting their deviance and task mastery.In the current study, we proposed a theoretical model examining whether nurses' job demands (the predictor) will affect task mastery and deviance (the outcomes) by increasing resource depletion.A multiwave field study of 172 nurses from two comprehensive hospitals was conducted to test the proposed theoretical model from April to August 2020. Descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analyses, correlation coefficients and linear regressions were used to test the hypotheses.The results suggested that even though job demands may temporarily increase nurses' task mastery and decrease their organizational deviance, they ultimately have a negative influence since resource depletion acts as a side effect that suppresses the two direct effects.The theoretical contributions and practical implications of our findings were discussed. Specifically, we suggested that healthcare institutions should provide abundant support for nurses to supplement their resource reserves to avoid the risk of potential medical malpractice.Practically, this study tried to emphasize the important role of nurses' resource condition. Especially we aimed to remind managers and leaders cannot just improve nurses' job demand to deal with the public health crises. They also need to focus on their resource condition during pandemics.