FACTORS l FFECTING NURSES' COMMITMENT AT WORK

Abstract

Commitment can be interpreted as reflecting feeling of loyalty and pride toward an organization and agreement with its goals and values. A committed nurse is characterized by several features including a sense of belonging to the organization, desire to remain employed and a willingness to invest effort in her job. A committed nurse is more productive, shows more initiative and help to create a more effective work organization.

Generally higher or lower levels of commitment have been shown to be major drive for nurses staying with or leaving an organization. Nurses' organizational commitment is of paramount importance for administrators and managers in health care organizations due to the crucial role nurses play in their organization's performance and productivity. Increased nurses' commitment improves quality and reduces absenteeism and turnover. Committed nurses do better work than uncommitted ones and organizations with committed nurses do better financially than organizations with uncommitted ones.

This study measured three different types of organizational commitment affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment. Also this study identified the factors affecting nurses' organizational commitment, such as nurses identification with their organization, trust management, showing a willingness to invest effort , participating in decision making, feeling positive about work, voicing concerns and feel their place of work is an equitable one in addition managerial strategies, all of these factors positively affect nurses commitment at work.

The aim of the study:

This study aims to identify the factors affecting nurses' commitment at work. The study was conducted in all medical and surgical inpatient units at Alexandria Main University Hospital (30 units). The study subjects included all nurses available at the time of data collection working in the above mentioned inpatient medical and surgical units. They amounted to 163 nurses from medical units and 230 nurses from surgical units. The total number of nurses, participated in this study were 393 nurses.

Two tools were used to collect data:

1- Organizational commitment questionnaire. It measured types and overall nurses' commitment and was designed by Meyer and Allen, (1990). It consists of(22 items) concerned with three types of commitment, namely affective commitment (9 items) continuance commitment (7 items) and normative commitment (6 items). 2- Factors affecting nurses' commitment questionnaire developed by Brewer (1995). It consists of ten factors, measured by 65 items.

The questionnaire was translated into Arabic and then distributed to (10) experts to test its content validity. A pilot study was carried out on 40 nurses (10%) of the sample around (393 nurses) randomly selected the study subjects. Data were collected over a period of three months.