NURSES IN PRIVATE HOSPITALS IN BANGALORE - A STUDY ON RETENTION

The healthcare industry encounters various challenges and the greatest is the shortage of nurses in both urban and rural areas, which is due to the high attrition rate.To arrest the simmering issues of retaining productive nurses by healthcare organizations, the present study attempts to investigate the factors that affect nurses’ retention in the healthcare organization. In doing so, the present study analyses the job-related factors that affect nurses’ job satisfaction, which in turn, affects nurse retention through the mediating effects of organizational commitment and intent to stay in healthcare organisations. The study also examined any differences in perception towards retention of nurses based on their demographics. Further, the study aimed to create a model for the retention of nurses in the private hospital sector. The hypotheses of the study are tested through a well-structured questionnaire and the responses obtained from 501 female nurses engaged in five hospitals in Bangalore were evaluated. The collected data analysed using SPSS 24. Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to confirm the conceptual framework created for this study by using software such as SMART PLS V.3. The outcomes show that motivation and hygiene factors were substantially related to job satisfaction of nurses, while stressors were not found to be the antecedents of job satisfaction, which, in turn, was significantly influenced by all the demographic factors together. Moreover, it was found that nurses’ retention, intent to stay, and organizational commitment were substantially affected by the job satisfaction of the organization. Besides, the study revealed that intent to stay mediated the relationship between organizational commitment and employee retention, but not between job satisfaction and employee retention. Further, the effects of job satisfaction on the retention of nurses were mediated by organizational commitment and intent to stay of the nurses in the hospital industry. Keywords: Nurses, Private hospitals, Retention, Intent to stay, Job satisfaction,