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Abstract
The essence of employee engagement is a strong emotional connection of employees with the position held and organization and the resulting willingness to make extra effort to ensure the success of the organization. Employee engagement is particularly important in health care, because it is demonstrably related to the quality of healthcare provided, the safety of the environment, the length and success of patient treatment, patient experience and satisfaction. Although the topic of engagement is very popular, relatively little is known about the specific predictors, factors and antecedents of employee engagement in the context of health care. The aim of the study is to analyze factors of employee engagement in health care context. A survey was conducted in three countries (Slovakia, Italy and Israel) and was completed by 484 employees working in different positions in health care sector. Using PCA analysis a large set of variables (16 factors of employee engagement) was reduced to two factors. Results ofANOVA indicate that the country, the size of the organization and the position held influences the extracted factors.
Keywords: factors; employee engagement; quality; health care.
1.Introduction
Recent years have seen an increasing interest in the study of employee engagement of health care professionals since employee engagement is considered an important prerequisite for high performance and high quality patient care, as suggested by the title of Rick Sherwood's (2013) article "Employee Engagement Drives Health Care Quality and Financial Returns". Also the research of Hernández-Vargas et al. (2014) showed relationships between engagement and service quality. Regarding the quality of health care, White, Butterworth and Wells (2017) identify the most compelling reasons for improving quality in healthcare: growing populations, changing healthcare needs, increasing healthcare costs, concerns about patient safety and reducing harm.
Despite a multitude of professional publications devoted to employee engagement, there is no universally acceptable and applicable definition of employee/work engagement. The reason for this inconsistency/ absence of a clear definition could be a fact engagement theme has been attracted by experts from many areas - human resource management, organizational development, business, psychology (Kim and Kolb, 2012, in Kim, 2014). Moreover, some authors criticize the concept of engagement arguing that it is "old wine in new bottles" (Jeung, 2011, p. 56). Schaufeli (2014, p. 18) believes that this...