Correlates of Staff Nurse Work Satisfaction in Hospitals with Shared Governance

Lack of staff nurse participation in hospital decision-making has been cited as a major reason for the dissatisfaction in nursing. Shared governance has been proposed as an organizational model that provides staff nurses with both the structure and the mechanism for having increased decision-making authority. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of organizational culture, perceived importance of involvement and actual involvement in decision-making, the discrepancy between importance and involvement, staff nurse years of involvement in shared governance, control over nursing practice, and work satisfaction among staff nurses working in hospitals with shared governance. A descriptive, correlational design was used to investigate 188 full-time RN staff nurses from three hospitals with shared governance. Organizational culture was eliminated from analysis because of the large amount of missing data. Three multiple regression models were tested. In the final prediction model, control over nursing practice was the strongest predictor of work satisfaction, accounting for 40% of the explained variance. The next most significant predictors were involvement in decision-making, years in shared governance, and years in nursing, for a total of 43% of the variance. Since the variables in the model only explained 43% of the variance, other factors need to be identified to further predict work satisfaction. Based on the findings in this study, staff nurse participation in shared governance is a vehicle for control over nursing practice and work satisfaction