Coping strategies and burnout syndrome in oncology nurses: the moderating role of resilience

Oncology nurses are routinely exposed to chronic emotional demands that increase their risk of burnout. Although coping strategies and psychological resilience have been widely studied as resources for occupational adaptation, little is known about how resilience modifies the relationships between specific coping strategies and individual burnout dimensions. Clarifying these component-specific moderating effects may improve our understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying burnout and inform the development of more targeted preventive interventions. This cross-sectional study included 100 oncology nurses from the Kazakh Research Institute of Oncology and Radiology in Almaty, representing 89.3% of all eligible staff invited to participate. Burnout was assessed using the Maslach Burnout Inventory, coping strategies using the COPE-30, and resilience using the Brief Resilience Scale. Associations between variables were examined using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients. Separate moderation models were estimated for each burnout component using mean-centered predictors, heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors (HC1), and bias-corrected and accelerated bootstrap confidence intervals based on 5,000 resamples. Statistically significant interaction effects were further examined using simple slopes analyses at low, mean, and high levels of resilience. Moderate levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization were observed, whereas reduced professional accomplishment was the most pronounced burnout dimension. Resilience demonstrated selective, component-specific moderating effects on the relationships between coping strategies and burnout components. For emotional exhaustion, significant interactions were identified for active coping, planning, and emotional and instrumental social support; their positive associations became statistically significant only at high levels of resilience. For depersonalization, higher resilience attenuated the associations of denial and behavioral disengagement with burnout. Reduced professional accomplishment exhibited the most heterogeneous pattern of moderation, including a reversal in the association with denial, as well as significant associations with religious coping and substance use that emerged only at high levels of resilience. Resilience did not function as a universal protective resource in the relationships between coping strategies and burnout. Its moderating effects were selective and depended on both the coping strategy and the specific burnout component. These findings indicate that burnout components should be examined separately and suggest that, for reduced professional accomplishment, resilience may influence not only the strength of coping–burnout associations but also the psychological meaning of individual coping strategies.