New graduate nurses’ professional identification awakened during COVID-19

Abstract

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has put health-care employees, especially nurses, under tremendous pressure, it may provide these workers with a chance to reassess their professional identification and break the “hangover” effect in socialization. Drawing on an identity construction process perspective, we explore the trajectory of professional identification among new graduate nurses, and propose that since the COVID-19 outbreak, new graduate nurses’ professional identification increases. Furthermore, the increased professional identification is positively related to both sensegiving, as a top-down process, and moral elevation, as a bottom-up process of identity construction via work meaningfulness. Using nine-wave longitudinal data (five waves before and four after the COVID-19 outbreak) from 322 new graduate nurses at a public hospital in China, we conducted discontinuous growth modeling (DGM) analyses to test our hypotheses. We found that new graduate nurses’ professional identification gradually fell during the initial months into professional practice (hangover effect), but rose significantly after the onset of COVID-19. Sensegiving and moral elevation, mediated by work meaningfulness, were positively associated with this increase in professional identification. Our findings shed light on professional identification dynamics in the crisis context and the disruptive socialization processes to overcome the hangover effect.