Job Satisfaction and the Impact of Immediate Recognition: Pilot Testing the Effectiveness of a KUDOS Program

Purpose: 

Job satisfaction of nurses remains a global concern.  Research suggests 42% of nurses perceive their skills and experience unrewarded.  Despite knowledge of benefits arising from employee recognition, a gap exists informing how to best reward nurses.  To effectively tackle the issue surrounding nurse job satisfaction, researchers must focus on reshaping current recognition programs supporting nurses in delivering comprehensive care.  This research project examines factors enhancing job satisfaction emphasizing immediate recognition of nurses.  Research suggests up to 35% of nurses are dissatisfied and intend to leave their current position.   Kanter’s theory of structural empowerment and Hertzberg’s motivation theory assisted the current research to explain nursing influences on job satisfaction.  The purpose of this poster presentation is to determine the effectiveness of a KUDOS immediate recogniton program with a focus on nursing job satisfaction.

Methods: 

The pilot study will use a quasi-experimental pretest/posttest mixed methods survey design over a thirty-day period.  The research questions for this study are: 1) What is the content validity of the PNJSS? 2) What is the reliability of the PNJSS? 3) Does the use of the KUDOS immediate recognition program increase nurse empowerment, teamwork, recgonition, communication, and leadership as measured by the 1-7 point Likert-type PNJSS?  The item level content validity index (I-CVI) was determined using (n=11) content experts employed in clinical nursing leadership. 2) Test-retest reliability using Pearson’s r correlation will be determined from a convenience sample of (n=30), and 3) Pilot testing of the KUDOS program will be conducted on a 38-bed unit with (n=65) nurses.  Difference in the mean scores of the PNJSS at time 1 and time 2 will be analyzed using a paired t-test with an alpha level of < 0.05.

Results: 

Content validity index (I-CVI) was computed by counting the number of experts giving a rating of either a 6 (agree) or 7 (strongly agree) for each of the 13 items on the PNJSS. Three items with an I-CVI of .55 were subsequently deleted from the PNJSS.  The remaining ten items ranged by subscale: Empowerment: .73-.82, Teamwork, .82-.91, Recognition, .64-.91, Communication, .91, and Leadership, .91.  The scale-level index (S-CVI) was computed by calculating the proportion of the ten items given a rating of either a 6 or 7 by all of the eleven experts and was determined to be .86.  Data collection for research questions 2 and 3 are currently in progress.

Conclusion: 

Evidence-based research suggests guided implementation of a KUDOS immediate recognition program may strengthen job satisfaction of the professional nurse.  The findings from this pilot study will lay the groundwork for more extensive research in the future.