The Effect of Cultural Orientation on the Association Between Organizational Commitment, Perception of Practice Environment, and Intention to Leave among Asian Nurses in the United States

Tuesday, 13 July 2010

Shwu-Ru Liou, PhD, RN
Department of Nursing, Chang Gung Institute of Technology at Chiayi Campus, Chiayi, Taiwan
Susan Grobe, PhD
School of Nursing, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Ching-Yu Cheng, PhD
School of Nursing, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan

Learning Objective 1: 1. The learner will be able to understand relationship between cultural orientation, perception of practice environment, organizational commitment, and intention to leave of Asian nurses.

Learning Objective 2: 2. The learner will be able to understand the influence of cultural orientation on the relationships between tested variables of first-generation Asian nurses.

Purpose: To examine relationships between organizational commitment, perception of practice environment, and intention to leave; test mediating effects of organizational commitment on perception of practice environment and intention to leave; and test influences of cultural orientation on mediating effect of organizational commitment. Methods: The study was a cross-sectional design with snowball sampling. The pilot study tested psychometric properties of questionnaires that were developed in western culture using on Asian nurses. The main study, which was reported here, analyzed data from 196 Asian nurses who were born in Far East countries and worked at least 6 months in current hospitals. Most participants (70.7%) were married, 44.4% were Philippines, 32.7% were Chinese, and 82.6% worked full-time. They lived 13.29 years in the U.S., practiced 7.06 years at current position, and their mean age was 39.67 years. The Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index, Collectivist Orientation Scale, and Anticipated Turnover scale were used. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, regression, and Sobel test were applied. Results: Asian nurses were collectivist-oriented, satisfied with their practice environment, committed to organizations, and had low intention to leave their jobs. Cultural orientation, perception of practice environment, and organizational commitment were positively inter-correlated, but negatively associated with intention to leave. Organizational commitment, which was also a mediator of perception of practice environment and intention to leave, was a strong predictor of intention to leave. Cultural orientation had direct effects on intention to leave but the mediating effects of organizational commitment did not change after controlling for cultural orientation. That was, cultural orientation did not show its influence on the relationships between organizational commitment, perception of practice environment, and intention to leave. Conclusion: Further research of longitudinal design with diverse ethnicities is needed to detect the causal relationships among variables in cultural orientation in the model.