Surveying the Relationship between Psychological Empowerment and Organizational Commitment in Nursing Staff

In today’s competetive world, the only sustainable competetive advantage for any organization (such as medical centers) is its staff and their role in the success of the organization. This is possible through empowerment of staff and getting them commited to their work. Thus, the aim of the present study is to find relationship between psychological empowerment and organizational commitment in nursing staff.

The present study is of a descriptive- correlative type that is based on the stratified random sampling method; 165 questionnaires were distributed among nurses working in two hospitals in Zahedan. Eventually 18 questionnaires were excluded for the lack of information or defects. The data collection tools were 3 questionnaires: 1) Profile’s study questionnaire 2) the Spreitzer’s psychological empowerment questionnaire (1996) and 3) the organizational commitment questionnaire of Allen and Meyer (1990). For data analysis, T-test, Pearson correlation and multiple regression were used.

1) The average of organizational commitment among nursing staff was 3.6734 showing that organizational commitment is rather desirable.2) The average of psychological empowerment was 4.238 showing that the empowerment and capacity is high. 3) Multiple regression result also indicated that among psychological empowement variables only meaningfullness feeling variable had a meaningful relationship with changes of the organizational commitment scores.

It is necessary that, by giving freedom of practice, effective management, upgrading motivation and self-management ability, mangers in medical- health centers provide conditions through in – service training, division of labor based on competence and merit condition, in which nursing staff consider their job valuable and have internal interest and believe in their ability and capacity for duties assigned to them and have the feeling of trusting each other, interest and merit which cause an increase in individual’s organizational commitment.