Relationship of functional roles in nursing to job satisfaction and authoritarianism in a selected private hospital

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a positive relationship between nurses'role function; mother surrogate and healer, and such factors as job satisfaction and authoritarianism, in a selected private hospital. The sample consisted of forty-seven registered professional nurses employed at the Utah Valley Hospital in Provo, Utah. These nurses were working on the medicalf surgical, pediatric, obstetrical and overflow units of the hospital. The criteria used for selection of the nurses in the sample weres (1) that the nurse be a graduate of an accredited school of nursing, and (2) that she be presently employed at the Utah Valley Hospital. The measuring instruments used in this study consisted of two questionnaires. The first questionnaire was developed by Dr. Robert Gray of the University of Utah Sociology department. This questionnaire was used to place the nurses into one of two basic functional roles; mother surrogate or healer. The fob satisfaction scale from this questionnaire was also utilized. The second questionnaire was Adorno's Authoritarian F scale. This scale was used to test whether the nurse possessed authoritarian or nonauthoritarian persona I ity tra its. The review of literature indicated that there was role conflict in the changing role of the professional nurse in the hospital situation and that this disequilibrium was in some way related to the areas of conflict between the functional roles of mother surrogate and healer. Based on the review of literature two hypotheses were made. First, that there would be a positive correlation between mother surrogate scores and job satisfaction. That is, nurses classified as healers would tend to be more satisfied with their jobs than those classified as mother surrogates. The authoritarian personality as classified by Adorno and his colleagues was compared to the functional role of the nurse. It was hypothesized that because of the authoritarian atmosphere of the hospital the technical nurse would be authoritarian. Therefore, a positive correlation between the affective-technical scale and authoritarianism was expected. There was no reliable correlation between mother surrogate scores and job satisfaction or authoritarianism. The findings did not support the writer's hypothesis that there would be a positive relationship between the functional role of the nurse, as demonstrated by the mother surrogate scale, and job satisfaction and authoritarianism in a modern private hospital.