Insights into Nurses’ Work: Exploring Relationships among Work Attitudes & Work-related Behaviours

Abstract

Work motivation has been associated with work productivity. In health care, low motivation levels have been associated with low productivity and linked to poor performance, decreased patient safety, and overall poor quality care. Hence the importance, ascribed in the literature, to clearly identifying the relationships between and among factors associated with work motivation - including work attitudes, and work behaviours linked to performance such as extra-role behaviours. Despite their importance to performance in health care, these relationships are understudied and poorly understood. The purpose of this study is to better understand the relationships of work attitudes - perceived organizational justice, perceived organizational support, and affective commitment - to one another and to extra-role behaviours amongst nurses working in acute and community care settings. A survey was developed and administered to frontline nurses working in Ontario. Relationships among the constructs of interest were examined using structural equation modeling and path analysis. Examining the relationships of these concepts in a single model is novel, and offers insights regarding their complexity. Findings further suggest that prior approaches to studying these relationships may be under-nuanced, and that conceptualizations of perceived organizational justice and affective commitment in particular may have led to erroneous conclusions regarding their associations with perceived organizational support and organizational citizenship behaviours. Keywords: Work attitudes; organizational justice; perceived organizational support; affective commitment; organizational citizenship behaviours; structural equation modeling; path analysis