Nursing Profession and Job Satisfaction

Whats is Job Satisfaction,Job satisfaction in Nursing ,Measure of Job Satisfaction in Nursing,Research Outcome about Nursing Job Satisfaction,Nursing Job Satisfaction and Care Outcomes.

Whats is Job Satisfaction

     Job
satisfaction is the degree to which individuals like their jobs. As a general
attitudinal construct, job satisfaction reflects a positive affective
orientation toward work and the organization, whereas job dissatisfaction
reflects a negative affective orientation.

Job satisfaction in Nursing 

    Job
satisfaction has been studied extensively in nursing, psychology, sociology,
management, and organizational development. Most commonly, researchers have
studied job satisfaction as a dependent variable in assessing the impact of
organizational changes and innovations, or as an intervening variable with
multistage models of employee turnover, retention, or absenteeism. 

    Currently,
nurses’ job satisfaction is being studied as a part of the organizational
context, in conjunction with variables such as nurse staffing, autonomy,
control over nursing practice, burnout, and emotional exhaustion to determine
effects on outcomes such as patient satisfaction, quality of care, adverse
events, morbidity, mortality, length of stay, and costs. 

    Registered nurse (RN)
staff in acute care hospitals has been the population of greatest interest in
studies of nurses’ job satisfaction. Less is known about job satisfaction among
RNs who work in other settings or about licensed practical/vocational nurses in
any setting. In early studies of organizations, workers’ liking or disliking
their jobs usually was labeled morale. 

    Midway through the 20th century,
researchers began to develop both general and dimension specific measures of
satisfaction dissatisfaction. General or global measures estimate an
individual’s overall feelings about the job. 

    In dimension specific measures,
subconstructs distinguish satisfaction about specific facets of the job, such
as the work or task, pay and benefits, administration, and, for nurses,
dimensions such as professional status, nurse physician relationships, and
quality of care. 

    As work on job satisfaction continued, debate arose about
whether job satisfaction and dissatisfaction were opposite ends of a single
continuum or were two separate constructs. 

    Although job satisfaction currently
is reported most often in the research literature, the one or two constructs
issue has not been resolved. The terms are used inconsistently and sometimes
interchangeably. 

    A more recent concern is the possibility that positive and
negative affectivity, which are mood dispositional personality traits,
contaminate effects of determinants (eg, autonomy, stress, burnout) on strain
related variables such as job satisfaction. 

    In a meta-analysis of affective
underpinnings of job perceptions, Thoresen , Kaplan, Barsky, Warren, and de
Chermont (2003) found that both positive and negative affect uniquely
contributed to the prediction of job satisfaction, organizational commitment,
emotional exhaustion, and personal accomplishment. 

Measure of Job Satisfaction in Nursing

    Commonly
used measures of job satisfaction have been influenced by or adapted from
instruments developed in the organizational research field. Subsets of the
Brayfield and Rothe (1951) items have been used frequently as general measures
of job satisfaction. 

    Prominent in the measurement of dimension specific job
satisfaction among nurses are the Index of Work Satisfaction (IWS) (Stamps,
1997), the McCloskey-Mueller Satisfaction Scale (MMSS) (Mueller &
McCloskey, 1990), and the Nursing Work Index (NWI )/ Revised Nursing Work Index
(NWI-R) (Aiken & Patrician, 2000; Kramer & Hafner, 1989). 

    These
measures all estimate job satisfaction at the individual level. Recently,
Taunton et al. (in press) adapted the Stamps IWS for use in the National
Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI). 

    The included adaptation
changing the wording of items to a unit level referent so that satisfaction
data could be aggregated to the unit level and analyzed with other unit-level
indicators (eg, nursing care hours per patient day, nurse staffing mix,
pressure ulcers, patient falls, and patient satisfaction) as part of the
American Nurses Association Safety and Quality initiative.

    Researchers
choose measures of job satisfaction based on the nature of the study and the response
burden for subjects. 

    For instance, a short, general job satisfaction measure
would impose less subject burden in a multisite study that includes multiple
measures of organizational and clinical variables or when assessing the overall
relationship of job satisfaction to behavior. 

    In contrast, researchers focused
on the impact of a specific nursing practice innovation in one setting might be
interested in nurse satisfaction about professional status, nurse physician
relationships, quality of care, or other dimension specific facets.     

Also, as
more researchers study job satisfaction as part of the unit organizational
context, it will be important to use a measure that is reliable and valid at
the aggregated unit or hospital level, such as the NDNQI-Adapted IWS (Taunton
et al., in press).

Research Outcome about Nursing Job Satisfaction

    Researchers
( Blegan , 1993; Irvine & Evans, 1995) conducting meta analyses of
accumulated nursing job satisfaction research have found that autonomy, stress,
commitment to the organization, and intent to stay in the job demonstrate the
strongest, most consistent correlations with job satisfaction; Autonomy and
stress usually are antecedents of job satisfaction, whereas commitment and
intent to stay are outcomes. 

    Other variables-with more moderate correlations
are communication with supervisor, recognition, routinization, communication
with peers, fairness, and locus of control. 

    In general, variables measuring job
characteristics (eg, routinization, autonomy) and work environment (eg,
leadership, stress) have stronger relationships than economic (eg, pay,
opportunity else where) or individual difference (eg, age, experience,
organizational tenure) variables. 

    More recently, researchers of the
organizational context for nursing have found higher nurse to patient ratios
are associated with lower job satisfaction and higher emotional exhaustion, as
well as higher patient risk adjusted mortality and failure to rescue (Aiken,
Clarke, Sloane, Sochalski , & Silver, 2002).

Nursing Job Satisfaction and Care Outcomes

    A
high priority for current and future research is examining the relationship
between nurses’ job satisfaction and outcomes of care, such as quality of care,
patient satisfaction, adverse events (eg, falls, pressure ulcers, failure to
rescue, infections), mortality, and the like. 

    These relationships need to be
studied not only in acute care settings, but also in the community, in home
care, and in long term care facilities which will allow improvement of outcomes
across all health care settings. 

    Issues that still need more elucidation are
first, the degree to which nurses’ positive and negative affectivity confound
relationships between job satisfaction and variables such as autonomy, job
stress, burnout, and emotional exhaustion. 

    Second, the association between
patient positive and negative affectivity and patient satisfaction with nursing
care is not clear. Here again, associations between nurse satisfaction and
patient satisfaction could be confounded by underlying affectivity. 

    Last, the
unresolved issue about whether job satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate
constructs warrants further attention. Nurses’ satisfaction and dissatisfaction
may associate differently with outcomes of care.