The Relationship Between Job Satisfaction of Primary Care Team Members and Quality of Care: A Comment on Mohr et al

Abstract

The authors of this article have raised an intriguing theoretical question that has potentially very significant policy and managerial implications for the world of health care. To paraphrase their question, what if there was a connection between the job satisfaction of the members of a primary care team and the quality of care they provided? And if there were such a connection, what kinds of policy and/or managerial interventions might be developed to increase team members’ satisfaction in service of helping improve quality? Might we, for example, be able to improve quality by changing certain attributes of the environment in which the teams work or certain things about the ways in which teams are composed—things that may influence job satisfaction? At a time when the search for ways to improve quality is a high priority in Washington and when experiments with paying for performance are becoming increasingly widespread, the question the authors raise has, perhaps, more potential relevance than they fully appreciate. That said, there are 3 issues that must be addressed before we get too excited about the potential: