Hospital administration in Portugal: relationship between seniority and employee involvement, and implications for turnover risk

Abstract

Introduction: The relationship between involvement and turnover intention in organizations is a recurring theme in research, with several studies highlighting the relationships between labor involvement and the intention to leave. Nurses are one of the most numerous professional groups of hospitals and their retention process in organizations is a complex phenomenon composed by multiple factors. One of these factors, labor involvement, translates into benefits for themselves and for the organizations they work for. This article aims to establish the relationship between seniority of nurses of Hospital Beatriz Angelo (Loures, Portugal) and its labor involvement, analyzing the implications of this relationship for the risk of organization turnover. Methods: For the characterizing variable seniority 351 valid responses were gathered, with a response rate of 56.25%. The absence of normality in several seniority categories in the distribution of the levels obtained for perceptions about labor involved led to the choice of the Kruskal-Wallis nonparametric test for detection of differences between data groups. Results: The obtained values show that there are significant statistical differences in perceptions about labor involvement of nurses on the basis of their seniority categories. Discussion and Conclusions: It was possible to determine that the work involvement of nurses is not uniform when analyzed according to seniority. The institution’s group of nurses with greater seniority has a reduced labor involvement which may reflect a greater propensity for organization turnover.