The Influence of Economic and Technology Factors on Performance Outcomes of Community Pharmacists in Nigeria: A Structural Equation Modeling Study

Abstract

Community pharmacists, as healthcare providers, operate within local and global business environments. Therefore, they are not immune from the effects of the business environment on practice performance. However, limited empirical research is available to explore these effects. The study proposes an empirical model to investigate the influence of economic and technological factors on the performance domains of community pharmacists in southwestern Nigeria. A cross-sectional study with self-administered questionnaires to 661 randomly selected community pharmacists. Performance measures were operationalized based on theory into 3 domains: operational, economic, and social performance domains. Study hypotheses were tested by applying factor-based structural equation modeling (SEM) using WarpPLS software. Results showed acceptable internal reliability of constructs and fit of the model to the data. Technology, compared to economic factors, had a significant influence on operational performance (β=0.242, p=0.001 vs. β=0.067, p=0.055). At the same time, economic factors had a higher influence on economic performance (β=0.070, p=0.036 vs. β=0.032, p=0.203). Both predictors affected social performance, with economic factors having a relatively stronger impact compared to technological factors. (β=0.095, p=0.007 vs. β=0.069, p=0.037). Community pharmacists should continue to strengthen economic value for their customers while incorporating relevant technology to improve practice outcomes. Macroeconomic policy by governments to enable community pharmacy practice is also recommended. The study recommends that community pharmacists emphasize the relevance of regular performance assessments to identify areas for improvement. This study adds substantial theoretical and methodological value to the existing literature by using SEM to explore the impact of business environmental factors on disaggregated performance measures of community pharmacists. Keywords: Community pharmacists, Economic, Measures, Nigeria, Performance, Technology, Structural equation modeling.

Exploring and Validating Performance Measurement Domains of Community Pharmacists Using Structural Equation Modeling: Implications and Recommendations for Research

“…The findings of the study were obtained using the illustrative step-by-step procedure for establishing the validity of theoretically developed constructs. The performance domains of community pharmacists-economic, operational, and social aspects were confirmed to be valid representations of theory as shown in Tables 1 and 2 [18]. This supports and opens more opportunities for the discovery of relationships that hitherto were not easily accessed.…”

“…Hence, researchers must ensure parsimony, measurement adequacy, and theoretically valid constructs. Therefore, the use of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and measurement invariance is a suggested methodology to adopt [12,[17][18][19]. Measurement invariance testing is a core requirement in cases of instrument bias suspicion and in situations where data is collected over two or more time points (longitudinal studies).…”