Addressing the issue of job performance among hospital physicians in Pakistan: The role of job security, organizational support, and job satisfaction

Purpose

The success of any organization is highly dependent on how it attracts, recruits, motivates, and retains a high-performing workforce. The reason is that performance as a phenomenon is closely related to aspects of effectiveness, knowledge management and quality from one side and to management, financing and development of the organization from the other. Especially for hospital physicians, job performance issues are inextricably linked to patient safety. Explaining the factors that influence employee performance remain a fundamental question for human resources management practitioners. The literature shows that a large number of factors influence job performance such as satisfaction from the profession, work environment, compensation policies, quality of work life, ability, effort, motivation, attitude, personality, and competence. This study looked at selected employee related factors, namely job security, organizational support, and job satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of job security and organizational support on hospital physician's job performance and the mediating role of job satisfaction on these relationships.

Methods

A cross-sectional quantitative approach was employed for this study. Hospital physicians working in public and private hospitals of Pakistan were selected. The sample comprised of 361 hospital physicians who were approached using the self-administered technique. To outline and explain the relationship of job security and organizational support with job performance and how job satisfaction could mediate these relationship, the data were analyzed using partial least squares-structural equation model (PLS-SEM).

Results

The results indicated that job security and organizational support positively affected job performance of hospital physicians. Moreover, job satisfaction mediated the link between job security and job performance as well as between organizational support and job performance.

Conclusions

We conclude that by providing job security and organizational support to hospital physicians, their job performance can be boosted. Physician satisfaction impacts physician behavior and, consequently, the quality of medical care. Physician satisfaction needs to be measured and monitored to improve working conditions and increase employment stability in the healthcare sector. Due to the health workforce crisis, knowledge regarding physician satisfaction and job security is essential to healthcare managers and policy makers for more effective human resources management.