The impact of professional and organizational identification on the relationship between hospital-physician exchange and customer-oriented behaviour of physicians.

Jeroen Trybou,Lieven Annemans,Paul Gemmel,Katrien Verleye,Gaelle De Caluwé

doi:10.1186/1478-4491-13-8

Jeroen Trybou, Lieven Annemans + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/1478-4491-13-8

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Abstract

BackgroundHospitals face increasingly competitive market conditions. In this challenging environment, hospitals have been struggling to build high-quality hospital–physician relationships. In the literature, two types of managerial strategies for optimizing relationships have been identified. The first focuses on optimizing the economic relationship; the second focuses on the noneconomic dimension and emphasizes the cooperative structure and collaborative nature of the hospital–physician relationship. We investigate potential spillover effects between the perceptions of physicians of organizational exchange and their customer-oriented behaviors.MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted on 130 self-employed physicians practicing at six Belgian hospitals. Economic exchange was measured using the concept of distributive justice (DJ); noneconomic exchange was measured by the concept of perceived organizational support (POS). Our outcomes consist of three types of customer-oriented behaviours: internal influence (II), external representation (ER), and service delivery (SD).ResultsOur results show a positive relationship between DJ and II (adjusted R2 = 0.038, t = 2.35; p = 0.028) and ER (adjusted R2 = 0.15, t = 4.59; p < 0.001) and a positive relationship between POS and II (adjusted R2 = 0.032, t = 2.26; p = 0.026) and ER (adjusted R2 = 0.22, t = 5.81; p < 0.001). No relationship was present between DJ (p = 0.54) or POS (p = 0.57) and SD. Organizational identification positively moderates the relationship between POS and ER (p = 0.045) and between DJ and ER (p = 0.056). The relationships between POS and II (p = 0.54) and between DJ and II (p = 0.99) were not moderated by OI. Professional identification did not moderate the studied relationships.ConclusionOur results demonstrate that both perceptions of economic and noneconomic exchange are important to self-employed physicians’ customer-oriented behaviours. Fostering organizational identification could enhance this reciprocity dynamic.

Highlights

In recent years, the importance of patient-centred care has expanded and has increasingly taken over the caregiver-oriented model
Economic and noneconomic exchange and customer-oriented boundary-spanning behaviours (COBSBs) No significant differences in the perceptions of economic exchange, noneconomic exchange, and physicians’ COBSBs were present in terms of gender and tenure
The results showed a significant relationship between perceived organizational support and internal influence (r = 0.458, p < 0.001) and external

Summary

Introduction

The importance of patient-centred care has expanded and has increasingly taken over the caregiver-oriented model. Ever since the groundbreaking work of Hesket and colleagues [7], it has been clear that spillover effects exist between the perceptions of employees of an organization and the perceptions of customers It appears that HR practices of organizations affect employee attitudes such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment and have a “spillover effect” onto customers (e.g. customer satisfaction and service quality perceptions). This effect refers to the dynamic in which employee attitudes seem to spill over onto customers in service encounters. We investigate potential spillover effects between the perceptions of physicians of organizational exchange and their customer-oriented behaviors

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