Job Motivation and Associated Factors among Health Care Professionals working in Public Health Centers of Gedeo Zone, Southern Ethiopia.

Abstract

Background; Increased motivation creates the conditions for a more effective workforce, but because work motivation is an interactive process between workers and their work environment, good management and supervision are still critical factors in reaching organizational goals. Motivation is crucial for organizations to function; without motivation employees will not put up their best and the organization’s performance would be less efficient. Objective: To assess Level of job motivation and associated factors among health care professionals working in public health institutions of Gedeo Zone, southern Ethiopia, 2015. Methods: A cross-sectional study design, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods was conducted in 36 health center of Gedeo zone, during February 20 to May 10, 2015. A total of 292 health care professionals selected by simple random sampling among 661. The data were analyzed using SPSS version 20.0 statistical software. Factor score was computed for the items identified to represent the level of job motivation by Varimax rotation method. Using this regression factor score, multivariate linear regression analysis was performed and the effect of independent variables on the regression factor score was quantified. Qualitative data collected using key informant interviews to triangulate with the findings from the quantitative data. Results: Among total respondents, 56.2% of them were male, the average age of the respondents was 28.69 (SD 6.25), ranging from 20 years to 50 years. Above three quarter 77.4% (226) of the respondents were discourage from working hard for different reasons. Among Health care professionals working in public health centers, only 57 (19.5%) of them were highly motivated, among 292 health care professionals, only 6.2% (18) of them are rewarded for their hard working. Sex, communication, resource availability, inadequate salary, feedback, training, working environment and workload were negative determinates of job motivation as measured by the three latent factors among health care professionals working in public health centers. Conclusion and Recommendations: This study revealed about half of health centers not give feedback for their employer, about half of health care professionals were not satisfied with communication between management and the staff, majority of health care professionals were not satisfied with their salary and around majority of employees are not recognized for their good work done. Around one fourth of the health care professionals were low motivated, healthcare organizations should maximize its effort to practice incentive schemes.