Psychological Empowerment in Hospital Administrative Staff Predicts their Organizational Commitment

Quality services delivery in the health settings is contingent on hospital administrative staff organizational commitment. Inspired by previous research indicating the prominent role of psychological empowerment in organizational commitment, this study aimed to explore the relationship between the two variables in hospital administrative staff. A random sample of 172 administrative staff in Khatam-ol-Anbia Hospital at Zahedan city, situated in South-Eastern Iran, was selected. Mishra and Spreitzer’s scale was used to measure psychological empowerment, which comprises 15 items grouped into five dimensions, including Meaningfulness, Competence, Self-determination, Impact, and Confidence. Organizational commitment was measure, using a short version of the Meyer and Allen’s scale. The participants responded anonymously to the items of the two questionnaires. Correlations analysis, t-test, and simple and multiple regressions were used to analyze the data. Significant positive correlations were found between psychological empowerment and its dimensions as perceived by hospital administrative staff and their perceived organizational commitment. Psychological empowerment was found to be a significant predictor of organizational commitment (β = 0.724, P < 0.001). In addition, among all dimensions of psychological empowerment, Impact (β = 0.474, P < 0.001) and Selfdetermination (β = 0.301, P = 0.001) significantly predicted the organizational commitment, together explaining 51.9% of the variance in the latter variable. Our results extend the established relationship between psychological empowerment and organizational commitment to the hospital administrative staff. In particular, the significant influence of Impact and Self-determination on organizational commitment implies that administrative staff’s organizational commitment will increase if they are given the adequate autonomy to make decision about the work processes. Psychological empowerment can only partially explain organizational commitment variance in hospital administrative staff suggesting existence of other influencing factor remaining to be explored. The fact that Impact shows a stronger effect on organizational commitment supports the notion that the extent to which administrative employees feel a sense of influence on the work processes and outcomes would be the most important factor affecting their organizational commitment. Our findings can help hospital administrators in developing strategies aimed at promoting their organizational commitment via psychological empowerment.