NEW YORK NURSE: March 2007
By Cindy Gurney, PhD, RN, Research Specialist; Foundation of New York State Nurses, Center for Research and Planning Committee
Did you know that your organization plays a role in your work satisfaction? If your managers and senior leadership understand this, they can use it to reduce job turnover. You, too, can put this information to use by helping your organization develop strategies to increase and enhance satisfying work conditions.
We know that your job satisfaction has been studied inside and out. It is one thing, however, to identify a group as satisfied or dissatisfied. A separate issue is understanding the factors that impact satisfaction so that job content and context can be manipulated to improve work conditions. Researchers and NYSNA members Chris Kovner and Carol Brewer, along with You-Wu Wu, Ying Cheng, and Miho Suzuki (2006) employed the theoretical framework of Price (2004) and yours truly (Gurney, Mueller, & Price, 1997) to study factors that link work satisfaction and turnover. Their study is reported in the first quarter 2006 issue of the Journal of Nursing Scholarship.
The researchers offered a national sample of 4,000 nurses the opportunity to participate in an Internet survey. The survey examined the work setting in terms of social support, job stress, promotion opportunities, professional values, disposition, direct patient care, job hazards, pay, and fairness of pay and benefits. It also examined RN characteristics such as demographics and overall health. The researchers also looked at characteristics of the metropolitan statistical area and job opportunities, for the possibility that these factors could influence nurse attitudes.
Ultimately 1,538 nurses returned valid surveys. Demographically, they were very similar to the nursing population in general. The authors used ordinary least squares regression to estimate a model for work satisfaction. This type of analysis measures whether factors vary together in some predictable way; if they do, we can say they are associated, but not necessarily that one causes the other.
Certain personal characteristics were associated with satisfaction, such as race (non-Hispanic Blacks were less satisfied) and overall health (those who described themselves in poor or fair health were also less satisfied), but I want to focus here on the summary message to organizations.
Although pay by itself did not influence work satisfaction in this study, the fairness of pay, termed in this study “distributive justice,” did. Other organizational factors that could enhance work satisfaction were paid time off, supervisory support, work group cohesion, reduction in the interference of work with family, autonomy, variety, and promotion opportunity. The good news is that these are factors that organizations can sway.
Notably absent in the list of significant findings was pay, as mentioned earlier, but also workload, work motivation, injuries, and benefits such as retirement benefits, medical insurance, tuition reimbursement, and work shift. The authors suggest these benefits may directly affect turnover without influencing satisfaction. Although workload and work shift did not have direct effects in this study, these researchers propose that if those factors are not fairly distributed, their impact may be felt through the variable of “distributive justice,” which was a significant determinant in this study.
This study substantially enhances the body of knowledge related to job satisfaction and other work attitudes. Its beauty is that it offers tangible support for measures that can be taken by organizations to enhance job satisfaction and which, hopefully, will result in increased nurse retention. Work satisfaction is influenced by efforts that buttress work group cohesion, modify job organization through added autonomy and variety, reduce interference between work and family, and improve fairness in matters of pay and benefits. I urge you to review the full text of this study (Kovner et al., 2006) for the guidance it offers for future research and organizational change.
Gurney, C. A., Mueller, C. W., & Price, J. L. (1997). Job satisfaction and organizational attachment of nurses holding doctoral degrees. Nursing Research, 46(3), 163-171.
Kovner, C., Brewer, C., Wu, Y., Cheng, Y., & Suzuki, M. (2006). Factors associated with work satisfaction of registered nurses. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 38(1), 71-79.
Price, J. L. (2004). The development of a causal model of voluntary turnover. In R. Griffeth & P. Hom (Eds.), Innovative theory and empirical research on employee turnover (pp. 3-34). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.
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