ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Occupational Health and Safety
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1641543
Relationship between Psychological Contract Fulfillment, Job Burnout, and Job Satisfaction among Pharmacists in Private Medical Institutions in Guiyang, China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Guiyang Hospital of Stomatology, Guiyang, China
- 2The First People's Hospital of Guiyang, Guiyang, China
- 3Zunyi Medical University, Zunyi, China
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The research utilized scales for psychological contract, job burnout, and job satisfaction for analysis. After conducting reliability and validity tests on the questionnaires, correlation analysis, mediation analysis, and multiple linear regression analysis were employed to explore the relationships among psychological contract fulfillment, job burnout, and job satisfaction among pharmacists in private medical institutions. Results The findings indicate that pharmacists' psychological contract fulfillment is significantly weakly negatively correlated with job burnout (r = -0.187, p < 0.01) and significantly strongly positively correlated with job satisfaction (r = 0.528, p < 0.01), and a significant strongly negatively correlation between the job burnout and the job satisfaction (r = -0.436, p < 0.01). Mediation analysis shows that job burnout plays an weakly mediating role in the relationship between psychological contract fulfillment and job satisfaction (12.16%, p < 0.01). This suggests that burnout is merely a minor component within a much broader context. In addition, a considerable proportion of pharmacists 43.23% indicated that their level of psychological contract fulfillment did not meet the benchmark value(most of the responsibility has been fulfilled). indicating significant psychological contract breaches within this group. Multiple linear regression analysis further identifies that demographic variables (age, employment length), psychological contract fulfillment, and burnout levels collectively serve as core predictors of job satisfaction. Conclusion The research suggests that private medical institutions should take proactive measures to ensure the stability of pharmacists' psychological contracts. For example, during the intervention process, preventive guidance should be provided to senior pharmacists to help them avoid breaches of the psychological contract and the further development of job burnout. For newly recruited pharmacists, selective preventive interventions should be implemented to achieve personalized psychological contract interventions. Finally, this research helps fill the research gap regarding pharmacists' psychological contracts in private medical institutions.
Keywords: Psychological contract, Job burnout, Job Satisfaction, Private medical institutions, pharmacist
Received: 05 Jun 2025; Accepted: 17 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Man, Lu, Chen, Luo and Tang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Fushan Tang, Zunyi Medical University, Zunyi, China
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