Study of Psychological Empowerment in Hospitals of Qom Province, Iran

It is necessary to study employees’ empowerment components to realize the empowerment process and enhance the organization's capacity to make empowerment atmosphere. Employee's viewpoints and attitudes affect organizational decision making and also their cooperation, partnership, and job satisfaction. Current research was done to study the empowerment components of the employees of the hospitals of Medical University of Qom in year 2011. This study was done using descriptive cross-sectional method on 365 employees of the hospitals of Qom University of Medical Sciences. The samples were equally selected from the hospitals using a stratified random method. The research tool was a questionnaire consisting of 15 closed-answer questions plus demographic characteristics. Data analysis was done using descriptive and analytical statistics. Independent t-test and analysis of variance was used to determine the intergroup differences. The amount of the hospital employees’ empowerment components with a mean of 3.89 was in good condition. Also, the employee's attitude toward this category was different. There was a significant difference between men and women's attitude toward job meaningfulness. There was no significant association between psychological empowerment indices and age, academic discipline, education level, and the type of unit or ward's activity with confidence interval of 95% (p>0.05). There was also a statistically significant association between employee's work experience and the component of sense of effectiveness. According to the results of this study, the amount of empowerment components in the employees of hospitals of the Qom University of Medical Sciences was in acceptable level. Therefore, it is suggested that university managers pay more attention to employee's capabilities for assigning more responsibilities to them, and make much effort by their programming to make an empowerment atmosphere, so that their high empowerment level will be their strength point.