Organizational trust and empowerment in restructured healthcare settings -Effects on staff nurse commitment

In today's dramatically restructured healthcare work environments, organiza tional trust is an increasingly important element in determining employee p erformance and commitment to the organization. The authors used Kanter's mo del of workplace empowerment to examine the effects of organizational trust and empowerment on two types of organizational commitment. A predictive, n onexperimental design was used to test Kanter's theory in a random sample o f 112 Canadian staff nurses. Empowered nurses reported higher levels of org anizational trust, which in turn resulted in higher levels of affective com mitment. However, empowerment did not predict continuance commitment-that i s, commitment to stay in the organization based on perceived lack of other job opportunities. Because past research has linked affective commitment to employee productivity, these results suggest that fostering environments t hat enhance perceptions of empowerment and organizational trust will have p ositive effects on organizational members and increase organizational effec tiveness.