Profit or Purpose: What Increases Medical Doctors’ Job Satisfaction?

Abstract

This study integrates two competing views to examine whether medical doctors are satisfied with their jobs when they perceive their hospitals as being oriented toward profit (i.e., rational choice theory) or purpose (i.e., public service motivation). Using a sample of 127 doctors from 70 hospitals, this study tests these competing views. The results show that doctors who perceive their hospitals as purpose-driven are likely to experience job satisfaction, and this pattern still holds even if they also perceive their hospitals to be emphasizing profits. However, only the purpose-driven orientation results in job satisfaction via a sense of meaningfulness. Thus, this study offers comprehensive evidence that while medical doctors are likely to be satisfied with their jobs when they work at either purpose-driven or profit-driven hospitals, only purpose-driven hospitals give doctors a sense of meaningfulness. This finding suggests that both rational choice theory and public service motivation perspective are valid; however, public service motivation plays a greater role in terms of a sense of meaningfulness. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.

Coalescence of CSR and happiness for corporate sustainability: a systematic review of literature

“…Winit and Kantabutra, 2017) and rational choice theory (e.g. Chang et al. , 2022) were seldomly applied in the literature on CSR and happiness.…”

“…Academic literature on this issue has mostly focused on one of the stakeholders and researched the effect of CSR practices on these groups. The most frequently studied issue is the effect of CSR on employees where topics such as employee psychology (Jeong et al, 2022b), job satisfaction (Chang et al, 2022), knowledge sharing of employees (Chtioui et al, 2022) and their life satisfaction (Lee et al, 2018) were researched. Customers form the other stakeholder group that is subject to numerous studies where the effect of CSR was questioned on subjects such as customer evaluations of the company with respect to meeting shareholder demands and being a socially responsible corporation (Gertner and Rifkin, 2018), brand equity judgements of customers (Kang and Namkung, 2018) and satisfaction, trust and loyalty of customers (Lombart and Louis, 2014).…”

“…The most frequently studied issue is the effect of CSR on employees where topics such as employee psychology (Jeong et al. , 2022b), job satisfaction (Chang et al. , 2022), knowledge sharing of employees (Chtioui et al.…”

Identifying and Prioritizing Service Compensation Factors Influencing Nurses’ Motivation: Application of Hybrid Fuzzy DEMATEL-BWM Method

“…Yuan et al ( 2021 ) found that the satisfaction level of health workers is related to their monetary income. Chang et al ( 2021 ) examined that the service motivation theory is valid for doctors’ job satisfaction. Also, Ni et al ( 2022 ) declared that rewards and salaries are among the most important factors for job satisfaction.…”