The Relationship between Social Capital in Hospitals and Physician Job Satisfaction

Abstract

BackgroundJob satisfaction in the hospital is an important predictor for many significant management ratios. Acceptance in professional life or high workload are known as important predictors for job satisfaction. The influence of social capital in hospitals on job satisfaction within the health care system, however, remains to be determined. Thus, this article aimed at analysing the relationship between overall job satisfaction of physicians and social capital in hospitals.MethodsThe results of this study are based upon questionnaires sent by mail to 454 physicians working in the field of patient care in 4 different German hospitals in 2002. 277 clinicians responded to the poll, for a response rate of 61%. Analysis was performed using three linear regression models with physician overall job satisfaction as the dependent variable and age, gender, professional experience, workload, and social capital as independent variables.ResultsThe first regression model explained nearly 9% of the variance of job satisfaction. Whereas job satisfaction increased slightly with age, gender and professional experience were not identified as significant factors to explain the variance. Setting up a second model with the addition of subjectively-perceived workload to the analysis, the explained variance increased to 18% and job satisfaction decreased significantly with increasing workload. The third model including social capital in hospital explained 36% of the variance with social capital, professional experience and workload as significant factors.ConclusionThis analysis demonstrated that the social capital of an organisation, in addition to professional experience and workload, represents a significant predictor of overall job satisfaction of physicians working in the field of patient care. Trust, mutual understanding, shared aims, and ethical values are qualities of social capital that unify members of social networks and communities and enable them to act cooperatively.

Social Networks of Professionals in Health Care Organizations

“…Researchers tend to agree that closed ties with coworkers are positively related to professionals' satisfaction: In hospital-based units, network closure boosted positive nurses' perceptions of organizational climate, which in turn buffered nurses from the negative effects of work stress (Garrett & McDaniel, 2001). Nurses receiving low support from coworkers reported low job satisfaction and low self-rated health (Lindholm et al, 2003); but it is of interest to note that the social support received by coworkers was unrelated to job satisfaction for both physicians and nurses occupying managerial roles (Lindholm, 2006;Lindholm et al, 2004) recent study suggested a more nuanced set of relations between job characteristics, social support and job satisfaction: social support received from coworkers, in addition to professional experience and work load, was shown to predict physicians' job satisfaction (Ommen et al, 2009). An interesting and almost unexplored area of research concerns the extent to which job satisfaction relates to network dynamics, in terms of creation, preservation, and dissolution of interpersonal ties with coworkers.…”

Investigating the Relationship between Organizational Social Capital and Service Quality in Teaching Hospitals

“…His efforts were pursued by Putnam in Europe and the theory of social capital was developed with the theories of Coleman and Putman (Samimi et al, 2009). Up to now, the relationships between social capital and numerous variables, such as quality of life (Nillson et al, 2006) trust, awareness and occupational satisfaction (Ommen et al, 2009), improved wellbeing and diminished poverty (Woolcock and Narayan, 2006), health and quality of life in workplace (Chen et al, 2010) have been demonstrated in many studies. Social capital creates collaboration, commitment, data sharing and trust.…”

Work Engagement von Krankenhausärzten: Welche Rolle spielen Sozialkapital und Persönlichkeitseigenschaften?

“…Eine Studie unter Krankenhausärzten ergab, dass ein als gering wahrgenommenes Sozialkapital signifi kant positiv mit Burnout von Ärzten assoziiert war [ 23 ] . Darü-ber hinaus zeigte sich, dass Sozialkapital einen beträchtlichen positiven Einfl uss auf die allgemeine Arbeitszufriedenheit von klinisch tätigen Ärzten hat [ 24 ] . Der Zusammenhang von Sozialkapital und Engagement fand in der Forschung nach dem Kenntnisstand der Autoren noch keine Beachtung.…”