Factors Predicting the Work Happiness of Professional Nurses

Boonyarak, Kongkwan

Tuesday, 1 November 2011: 10:20 AM

Kongkwan Boonyarak, MSN
Department of nursing, Police General Hospital, Bangkok, Thailand
Areewan Oumtanee, RN, PhD
Faculty of Nursing, Chulalongkorn University, Pathumwan, Bangkok, Thailand

Learning Objective 1: The learner will be able to understand relationships among factors relating to work happiness.

Learning Objective 2: The learner will be able to predict work happiness of professional nurse based on given condition.

The purposes of this research were to study work happiness of professional nurses; to examine relationships among personal factors, healthy working environments, work characteristics and work happiness; and to analyze predictors of work happiness as perceived by professional nurses in Police General Hospital, Bangkok, Thailand. The research subjects were 267 professional nurses who were selected by multi-stage sampling. Research instruments were personal factors, healthy work environments, work characteristics, and work happiness questionnaires. The content validity index of healthy work environments, work characteristics, and work happiness questionnaires were .92, .96, and .92, respectively and the reliability was tested by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, which were .96, .95, and .93, respectively. The data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics; frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient and stepwise multiple regression analysis.

Major findings revealed that work happiness of professional nurses was at the high level (mean = 4.23, SD = 0.54). Personal factors of professional nurses in terms of age, marital status, educational level, working experience were not related to work happiness. Work characteristics and healthy work environments were significantly and positively related to work happiness of professional nurses at the .05 level (r = .58 and .45 respectively p < .05). The predictors of work happiness were work characteristics and healthy work environments . They accounted for 34.7 percent of variance (R² = .347, p < .05). The study equation of this analysis was as follows:

Ź_{Work happiness of professional nurses} = .412 Z _{Work characteristics}+ .286 Z _{Healthy work environments}

The finding indicated that healthy work environment and work characteristics can increase work happiness of professional nurses. Thus nurse executive should provide appropriate work environment and work characteristics for nurses in order to increase their happiness at work.

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