Do Organizational Values and Leadership Impact Staff Engagement, Wellbeing, and Patient Satisfaction?

Abstract

Purpose

Organizational culture has been shown to be an important characteristic that influences behaviors of groups and individuals within an organization. This study seeks to examine the relationships among various organizational values, staff engagement, staff wellbeing, and patient satisfaction in community hospitals.

Participants and Methods

Organizational values and engagement data were retrieved from all-staff survey results from 387 clinical units at Mayo Clinic Health Systems. For patient satisfaction data, Press Ganey scores were matched with data for 17 outpatient units from the all-staff survey. Cluster analysis was used to create constructs from the staff satisfaction survey. Reliability was obtained using Cronbach’s alpha. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to create the measurement model for prediction of constructs. Correlation was used to examine the relationship between culture and patient satisfaction.

Results

From the all-staff survey results, we identified nine constructs related to organizational cultural values, staff well-being, and employee engagement. We were able to determine a structural equation model for values and engagement that had an excellent fit. Staff’s sense of fairness had a significant impact on how staff provide service excellence. Cultural values of excellence and innovation were positively correlated with large effect size in ten out of eleven patient satisfaction measurement domains and all were statistically significant.

Conclusion

Values of excellence had a larger positive relationship with patient satisfaction than all other variables. How staff perceive the level of the organization’s commitment to its values had impact on both staff engagement and wellbeing. This study also showed that the construct of wellbeing and patient satisfaction scores are not correlated. Staff will strive to provide excellent experience and good patient care regardless of their state of wellbeing.

Keywords:

• culture
• values
• engagement
• well-being
• patient satisfaction

Ethics

This study has been deemed exempt by the Mayo Clinic IRB (study ID:19-001207) as this study does not involve humanitarian use device for clinical treatment or diagnosis, emergency use situation, creation of a repository that will store identifiable private information or identifiable biospecimens from living individuals, or a systematic investigation.

Acknowledgments

This study has been funded by the Mayo Clinic Values Council.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.