Professional Identity, Psychological Resilience, and Adaptive Performance in Junior Nurses Exposed to Workplace Bullying: A Latent Profile and Network Analysis

To identify resource-adaptation profiles and profile-specific network organization among junior nurses exposed to workplace bullying by examining professional identity (PID), psychological resilience (PSR), and adaptive performance (ADP).

A multicenter, cross-sectional study.

Survey data were collected from 7231 junior nurses in 90 tertiary hospitals in Sichuan Province, China; 5839 met the workplace bullying exposure criterion and were included. Latent profile analysis was performed using 36 item-level indicators of PID, PSR, and ADP. Ordered logistic regression examined factors associated with profile membership, and network analysis compared profile-specific resource organization. Robustness was assessed using network comparison tests, residualized networks, hospital-cluster robust sensitivity analysis, and bootstrap stability analyses.

Three profiles were identified: the resource-constrained adaptive profile (n = 1906, 32.64%), moderate resource-adaptation profile (n = 3152, 53.98%), and high resource-adaptation profile (n = 781, 13.38%). More frequent night shifts, longer weekly working hours, poorer sleep quality, and lack of regular exercise were associated with greater odds of membership in a more resource-constrained profile. The high resource-adaptation profile showed the highest global network strength (16.223) and the largest mean absolute nonzero edge weight (0.086), despite fewer nonzero edges. PID2 (Social confidence), PID8 (Social interaction), PSR2 (Achievement pride), and PSR3 (Calm handling) repeatedly served as bridge nodes. Bootstrap analyses supported centrality stability, with CS coefficients of 0.750 across base and residualized networks.

Junior nurses exposed to workplace bullying showed heterogeneous resource configurations and profile-specific network organization. Integrating latent profile and network analyses showed how PID, PSR, and ADP may be configured and interconnected under a resource-threatening work context.