Citizenship-behavior, cooperation and job satisfaction of medical and nursing teams in an Israeli hospital

The purpose of this paper is to investigate into the relationships among citizenship behavior within medical and nursing teams, cooperation among these teams within hospital units and job satisfaction of members of those teams.

Data were gathered via questionnaires, administered to 107 doctors and nurses of a small hospital in Israel, regarding their job satisfaction, their evaluation of the citizenship behavior within their own professional team (medical or nursing) and the extent of cooperation of their own team with the other professional team. Preacher and Hayes’s mediation analyses were carried out on the data.

The findings show that medical–nursing cooperation mediates the relationship between citizenship behavior within the professional team (medical or nursing) and job satisfaction. When analyzed separately for doctors and nurses, results show that job satisfaction is predicted by the cooperation between the medical and nursing staff within hospital units, for nurses only. Citizenship behavior is shown to predict job satisfaction for each of the two professional sectors. Although for nurses, both factors affect their levels of job satisfaction, whereas for the doctors, cooperation affects citizenship behavior within the medical team, which, in turn, affects their job satisfaction.

The research sample is small and culturally specific, thus limiting the generalization potential of this study.

The unique nature of teamwork within hospital departments is hereby investigated. The findings shed light on a critical issue of hospital human resource management, which has not been previously investigated, and may have practical implications regarding hospitals’ overall management policies.