Study On Occupational Commitment And Influencing Factors Of Nursing Staff Turnover

Nurse shortage was threatening global health care system. At the same time, while the demand for nursing is growing, some nurses chose to leave their profession. Both of these challenge nursing administration. This paper reports the findings of a quantitive and a qualitative study which explored what factors were most likely to influence nurse turnover wthin a conceptual framework built around turnover intention, occupational commitment, job stressor and their antecedents and consequences. And the study was divided into three parts. At first, we revised an available tool to measure nurse occupational commitment in China, the outcome of which supported a revised five-dimension measure of nurse occupational commitment consisting of affective, normative, accumulated investment costs, accumulated emotional costs and limited alternatives. Then, 500 nurses were surveyed. As expected, nurse occupational commitment and job stressor have significiant influence on turnover intention (β=-0.416,β=0.353, respectively). Individual demographic character (including age, the length of nursing service, marital status etal.) were significiantly correlated with nurse turnover intention. At last, seven nurses were interviewed for exploring the reason for turnover more deeply. The results showed that whether nurses decided turnover or not based on evaluation on occupation, organization and self condition combined with certain external situation. This study suggested increasing occupational commitment of nurse and decreasing their perceived job stress according to individual characters may be effective for controlling nurse turnover.