Registered nurse understanding of organisational commitment and its link to retention: A grounded theory study

"Destabilisation of the nursing workforce due to poor retention creates inconsistencies and disruptions to the delivery of health care services. It can also have a negative impact on patient care and safety. If registered nurses remain in their jobs then hospitals and the health care system will realise significant savings in costs associated with replacing registered nurses. The impact of the nursing shortage is that health care facilities will continue to have difficulty replacing registered nurses once they have left. Focusing on nurse retention rather than on recruitment, may be a useful strategy to address the nursing shortage. Organisational commitment as a construct in workforce research has been related both negatively to turnover intentions and positively related to retention amongst employees. This construct was applied to this research which used a Grounded Theory methodology to examine how registered nurses understand organisational commitment and its link to retention. The registered nurse participant group came from acute care hospitals in Australia. The findings of this research are posited privileging the voices of the participants. Results add to the existing body of knowledge and are able to be explained and supported by existing literature within the field. The purposive sample group contributed to this study by participating in semi-structured in-depth interviews in which they described and discussed their commitment and their experiences related to workplace commitment and its link to retention. The main finding of this study was that the registered nurse participants understood organisational commitment to be at the ‘local’ level. That is, being committed to their work unit, to their nursing practice within the work unit and to the patients within the work unit. The strength of the participants’ organisational commitment, and hence their retention, was influenced positively or negatively by the management behaviours of their Nurse Managers. These findings formed the substantive theory of how registered nurses understand organisational commitment and its link to retention"--Abstract.