Abstract
Background: Health services organizations need to understand how they best can achieve important organizational goals such as lowering healthcare professionals’ turnover intentions, increase their job satisfaction and level of service quality provided to patients. This study aims to test whether work engagement of healthcare professionals is a core factor in the achievement of these preferred organizational goals. The study also aims to explore whether work engagement is manageable through the direct impact of organizational culture and climate and indirectly for the accomplishment of organizational goals.Methods: The proposed conceptual model was tested in a quantitative study where healthcare professionals, in this study represented by the group of hospital nurses, participated. The data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling in Stata.Results: The results can be divided into three sub-results. First, work engagement of health professionals was found to be positively related to service quality of care (b = 0.551) and job satisfaction (b = 0.883). Job satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between work engagement and turnover intention and in itself explains almost 60% (R2 = 0.59) of turnover intentions. Second, health professionals’ perception of organizational culture (b = 0.278) and collaboration climate (b = 0.331) were both directly related to their work engagement. Third, work engagement fully mediates the relationship between organizational culture, organizational climate and service quality of care and job satisfaction. Moreover, work engagement particularly mediates the relationship between collaborative climate and job satisfaction.Conclusions: This study contributes to extending and deepening previous research on work engagement in health services research. Specifically, it reveals the essential role that work engagement of healthcare professionals plays for the achievement of organizational goals. Consequently, leaders and managers of healthcare organizations should have a serious focus on health professionals’ work engagement and put it on their meeting agenda regularly because it is clearly a core driver to enabling multiple desirable outcomes for healthcare organizations.
The Relationship Between Workplace Spirituality, Job Satisfaction and Attitude Toward Death Among the Staff of the Emergency Department
