Abstract

Purpose: To discover some factors and their prevalence affecting employee satisfaction in a large modernhospital using Maslow’s five-level hierarchy of human needs, to help with the aim of improving both professionalproductivity and employee satisfaction.

Methodology: A case study questionnaire was administered to 150 participants in a large modern regionalhospital over a month in 2013, with results from Likert scales analysed using descriptive analysis, means and SDsand One way ANOVA to tabulate and analyse satisfaction measures. Employee satisfaction, or how employeesrespond emotionally to work, is a significant factor for organizational success and profit in improving employeeperformance and motivation. Satisfaction was measured on 18 Likert subscales of items based on responses toMaslow’s hierarchy of need fulfillment concerning working environment, payment and promotion, fairness andrelations with supervisors.

Results: Analysis of 121 suitable responses among roughly two thirds males and one third females showed40.5% males of the total with bachelor degrees and 24% had master degrees; 22.3% females had bachelor with13.2% masters’ degrees. Overall employee dissatisfaction was 88.4% (satisfaction 11.6%) with the highest itemscore for “Hospital’s influence on raising the Jordanian standard of living” and lowest for “priorities andperformance reporting system”.

Conclusions: Quality work environment was significant for achieving Maslow’s Safety and Belongingness,contributing to Esteem needs and fairness in working hours. Improved salaries and treatment could satisfyEsteem needs and help some achieve Self-actualization. Supervisor- employee relationships were a significantfactor with Belongingness and Esteem needs requiring significant improvement. For increased motivation andproductivity personal growth and fulfillment possibilities must be improved to encourage and release theprofitable potential of Self actualization.

Recommendations: (1) Improve psychological and interpersonal work environment by efficient communicationamong employees and change to a more collaborative managerial style.(2) Improved remuneration to recognize performance and service quality.(3) Fairness requires an efficient, collaboratively developed means to reward employee quality performance, toanswer needs for Esteem and Self-actualization.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.