Abstract
A lot of psychiatric nurses in Japan are working in private hospitals. It is safely to say that every kind of problems related to psychiatric nursing can be observed there. In such a situation they necessarily encounter various problematic events to be seriously considered and dealt with, making up their character as psychiatric nurses. Finally, their commitments to the organizations are settled. In this study, we attempted to classify the types of commitment to organizations by psychiatric nurses and investigate how each of them affects their professional care behaviors.
The subjects were 1,313 nurses working in 13 Japanese psychiatric hospitals located in Kanto and westward, and required to answer a questionnaire. The items surveyed include four measurement scales and questions concerning their attributes, ranging from age, academic career to relationship to the people they work with. The total number of questions was 95. The collected data was analyzed under covariant structure analysis and the following results were obtained:
1) Affective commitment and continuous commitment are both related to the quality of professional care behavior in a reversal way. Those who have strong affective commitment have a friendly and positive feeling to their organizations, and those who have strong continuous commitment tend to work just for making a living. The former provided professional care behavior to their patients better than the latter.
2) The level of job satisfaction, which is a prior factor of affective commitment, is strongly related to the degree of relationship to colleagues and patients' families, and how long they have spent working as psychiatric nurses.
