Intensive care nurse: job tension and satisfaction as a function of experience level.

It has been suggested that experienced ICU nurses are better able to cope with the complexity of their environment and, as a result, achieve greater satisfaction than their less-experienced counterparts. One hundred ten ICU nurses from a large Midwestern medical center were requested to fill out a job tension and job satisfaction questionnaire. The results showed that job tension and job satisfaction remained relatively constant as the number of years on the job increased, refuting the notion that work experience automatically facilitates a mastery of environmental demands. As expected, job tension was inversely related to job satisfaction.