Empowerment versus Job Satisfaction among Nurses

Abstract

urses often work within a climate of disempowerment along with high organizational demands placing them under stress. Nurses are not powerless due to lack in their competence or motivation, but because lack of awareness and enabling system and structure. Thus, many hospital and nurse administrators provide staff nurses with low control over their practice. This would jeopardize nurses’ physical and emotional wellbeing, with lowed commitment and disengagement, and ultimate adverse effects on the quality of patient care. The aim of this study was to investigate empowerment and job satisfaction among nurses working at the Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital, Ain Shams University. This correlational study was carried out at the Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital at Ain Shams University. It included a consecutive sample of 100 staff nurses with at least one year of experience in the current job. Nurses on long leaves during the study were excluded. A self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection. It included the Conditions of Work Effectiveness (CWE), the Psychological Empowerment, and the Job Satisfaction questionnaire, in addition to a section for the demographic and job characteristics. The tool was face and content-validated through the opinions of a panel of experts in Nursing Administration. It was pilot-tested on 10 staff nurses who were not included in the main study sample. The pilot showed a high reliability of the three questionnaire. The fieldwork lasted from December 2014 to June 2015. The main study findings were as follows.  Nurses’ age ranged between 20 and 40 years, with median 27 years, and 53% had nursing diploma. Their experience years ranged between one and 22years, and 42% attended training courses.  There were generally low levels of work empowerment, the highest being related to support at work (52%), and the lowest related to availability of resources and work facilities (22%).  In total, 29% of the nurses had high work empowerment.  Psychological empowerment was generally high, particularly for efficiency (87%), while only the dimension of impact low (37%).  Overall, 89% of the nurses had high total psychological empowerment.  Only 28% of the nurses had high total empowerment.  Nurses were mostly satisfied with the relations with peers (78%) and compensation (75%), but least with the work environment (53%).