Organizational Cynicism of the Nurses: A Phenomenological Study

Organizational cynicism, as newly conceived concept of staff-manager relations, and as one of the most important attitudes of employees, has recently received considerable attention from many researchers and managers. Provided that pessimistic feelings grow among nurses with respect to the hospital they serve, their workplace suffers severe damages and hardships which lead to a substantial decline in its performances. Given the key role of nurses as valuable human resources in providing services to people, the main purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of nurses about organizational cynicism.
This was a qualitative research, with phenomenological approach. The participatns were selected from nurses employed in public hospitals of North Khorasan Province, Iran. Purposive sampling was used to select 19 participants. In-depth semi-structured interviews were the date collection method. In addition, data were analyzed using Colaizzi’s method.
The results of this study revealed 3 main themes including cognitive factors (disrespecting the nurses, injustice, hypocrisy, unexceptionable environment, nepotism, violation of the psychological contract, and incompetent authorities of the hospital), feeling factors (hospital politicization, lack of social means, and feeling an imposed forced labor on nurses), and behavior factors (not recommending the nursing profession to the others, no tendency to an early retirement, no desire to see the progress of others, criticizing and not accompanying the management decisions, and allowing to personally utilize the hospital’s facilities).
The findings indicate that preventing the nepotisme, organizational justice, respecting nurses, and reducing political games of the hospital have a significant impact on the reduction of organizational cynicism among the nurses. As a result, the emphasis on aspects of procedural, interactional, and interactive justice could reduce organizational cynicism of nurses. On the other hand, reverence and respect for nurses will have a significant effect on reduction of organizational cynicism. Therefore, having nurses incentivized in different events, it is possible to mitigate their organizational cynicism feelings.