Abstract
In general, empowerment is defined as the motivational concept of autonomy and self-efficacy. Recently, the concept of empowerment is applied to improve organizational staff's job satisfaction and organizational commitment in many organizations. Empower-ment in service organizations, i.e., hospitals, has certainly generated more publicity than any other organizations. The objectives of this study are, first, to measure the degree of hospital employees' empowerment using Spreitzer(1995)'s empowerment theory, second, to analyze the causal relationship of organizational and job characteristics, a degree of empowerment, and organizational performance(job satisfaction and organizational commitment), and third, to offer the strategy for the improvement of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Spreitzer insists that the empowerment is composed of 4 dimensions(meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact). And he argues that various work-related characteristics is a direct cause of empowerment and the indirect cause of job satisfaction and organizational commitment, mediated by the empowerment latent variable. In order to perform this study, data were collected by self-administered questionnaires from hospital employees working in administrative department of 3 university hospitals in Inchon and Kyunggi-Do region. The number of cases is 181(response rate; 86%). The Collected data were analyzed with SPSS Ver. 10.0 and AMOSV Ver. 4.0. First, to test validity of variables, the factor analysis was used. Second, to test reliability, Cronbach's alpha coefficients was calculated. Cronbach's alpha of empowerment variable is 0.8323 showing that there's no problem in regard to the internal consistency. Also the Cronbach's alpha of other variables are 0.8301 of the degree of perceived control, 0.6705 of job characteristics, O.8787 of compensation, 0.9254 of job satisfaction, and 0.8389 of organizational commitment, respectively. Among the questions of job characteristics, two survey questions are deleted due to lowering the reliability. Third, to test multicollinearity and correlation of variables, the correlation analysis was performed. There was no problem of multicollinearity. Finally structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis was conducted to find the causal relationship of organizational and job Characteristics, empowerment, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The 16 variables are included for the SEM analysis. The major results of this study are as follows: First, in the case of model fitness, the condition of x$^2$ statistic(92.187) is not fully satisfied, but the indices of GFI(0.912), AGFI(0.863), NFI(0.917) and CFI(0.928) are partially satisfied, which needs to upper 0.90. Second, in the result of hypotheses testing, all hypotheses are accepted and have a positive effect in 95% or 99% confidence interval(P<0.05 or P<0.001) except the effect of compensation variable on empowerment(P=0.082). Third, in regard to the direct, indirect, and total effect of variables, the direct effect of perceived control, task characteristics, and compensation on job satisfaction are 0.728, 2.264, 0.328 and on organizational commitment are 0.094, 1.411, 0.418, respectively. Also the indirect effect of perceived control, task characteristics, and compensation on job satisfaction are 0.311, 0.196, 0.028 and on organizational commitment are 0.210, 0.132, 0.019, respectively. Thus, these findings imply that various work-related factors are direct effect of empowerment and indirect effect of result variables, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Also These results showed that the workplace empowerment is significant mediating factor of employee's job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
