Organisational Justice and Political Agency among Nurses in Public Healthcare Organisations: A Qualitative Study Protocol.

Camelia López-Deflory,Amélie Perron,Margalida Miró-Bonet

doi:10.3390/ijerph18179110

Abstract

Nurses are rarely treated as equals in the social, professional, clinical, and administrative life of healthcare organisations. The primary objective of this study is to explore nurses’ perceptions of organisational justice in public healthcare institutions in Majorca, Balearic Islands, Spain, and to analyse the ways in which they exercise their political agency to challenge the institutional order when it fails to reflect their professional ethos. An ethnomethodological approach using critical discourse analysis will be employed. The main participants will be nurses occupying different roles in healthcare organisations, who will be considered central respondents, and physicians and managers, who will be considered peripheral respondents. Data generation techniques include semi-structured interviews, a sociodemographic questionnaire, and the researcher’s field diary. This is one of the first studies to address organisational justice in healthcare organisations from a macrostructural perspective and to explore nurses’ political agency. The results of this study have the potential to advance knowledge and to ensure that healthcare organisations are fairer for nurses, and, by extension, for the patients in their care.

Highlights

Organisational justice is defined as employees’ perceptions of their organisation’s behaviour, decisions and actions and the influence of these on employees’ own attitudes and behaviour in the workplace [1]
The primary objective of this study is to explore nurses’ perceptions of organisational justice in public healthcare institutions in Majorca, Balearic Islands, Spain, and to analyse the ways in which they exercise their political agency to challenge the institutional order when it fails to reflect their professional ethos
Focusing on nurses will allow us to understand their perspectives regarding their status in healthcare organisations, the elements explaining this status, their aspirations when it comes to building fairer healthcare organisations, and their ideas and/or concrete actions taken to make this a reality, allowing them to look after their own interests and improve the care they offer their patients

Summary

Introduction

Organisational justice is defined as employees’ perceptions of their organisation’s behaviour, decisions and actions and the influence of these on employees’ own attitudes and behaviour in the workplace [1]. Of the rare studies carried out in this context, most have opted for a quantitative methodology and have studied nurses, aiming to find significant relationships between the different dimensions of organisational justice and variables such as trust in the organisation [4,5], organisational identification [4] and commitment [6,7,8], job involvement [9], job satisfaction [4,7,10,11], perceived self-efficacy [4], empowerment [12,13], intraprofessional collaboration [14], deviant behaviours [15], organisational citizenship behaviour [16,17,18], violent assaults by patients [14], mobbing [19], moral distress [10,20,21], presence of depressive symptoms [21], health complaints [22] and early retirement intentions [9], among others.

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion