Associations of Organizational Justice and Job Characteristics with Work Engagement Among Nurses in Hospitals in China

Work engagement of nurses has a great effect on their productivity, patient outcomes, and organizational performance. It is important to explore what can be done to facilitate nurse engagement. In this study, we surveyed a total of 1,065 nurses chosen from seven hospitals in China by random cluster sampling to explore the state of nurse engagement and its associations with organizational justice and job characteristics. The mean score for nurse engagement was 3.5 (SD = 1.5) on a 0-6 scale, and in hierarchical multiple regression analyses we found that nurse engagement had statistically significant relationships with the two organizational justice dimensions of distributive justice (beta = 0.13, p < .01) and informational justice (beta = 0.17, p < .05); and the three job characteristic dimensions of task significance (beta = 0.15, p < .01), job feedback (beta = 0.10, p < .01), and skill variety (beta = .08, p < .05). Hence, work engagement of nurses was not at a high level, and nursing leaders should consider enhancing their engagement through creating motivational job characteristics and improving nurses' perception of organizational justice.