Exploring the Relationships Among Safety Climate, Job Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment and Healthcare Performance

Using data from large-scale survey of some 50,000 healthcare professionals in Italy, we explore the relationships among safety perceptions, self-reported levels of job satisfaction and organizational commitment and objective performance measures. This work aims at contributing a nascent stream of research that investigates how safety climate predicts variables beyond safety outcomes [1, 2], such as self-reported levels of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Whereas most previous studies in this area exclusively rely on personnel data, we also analyse how safety perceptions, organizational commitment and job satisfaction jointly predict healthcare performance as measured through objective multidimensional indicators [3]. In order to test our hypotheses, we used data collected from an organizational climate survey of the employees of 68 public health authorities from eight Regional Health Systems (RHSs). This survey is an individual-based questionnaire, which contains measures regarding safety climate, job satisfaction, organizational commitment as well as other self-reported attitudes and behaviours. The survey is administered via computer assisted web interviewing (CAWI) on a census basis [4]. The survey has been conducted in a network of RHSs that adopt and fund, on a voluntary basis, a common performance management system (Inter-Regional Performance Evaluation System, IRPES), aimed at collecting the performance data of health authorities for benchmarking [5]. Our findings show that safety perceptions significantly predict job satisfaction, organizational commitment as well as objective measures of healthcare performance. We use structural equation modelling to illuminate multivariate associations among these constructs.