Got spirit? The spiritual climate scale, psychometric properties, benchmarking data and future directions.
Abstract
Organizations that encourage the respectful expression of diverse spiritual views
have higher productivity and performance, and support employees with greater organizational
commitment and job satisfaction. Within healthcare, there is a paucity of studies
which define or intervene on the spiritual needs of healthcare workers, or examine
the effects of a pro-spirituality environment on teamwork and patient safety. Our
objective was to describe a novel survey scale for evaluating spiritual climate in
healthcare workers, evaluate its psychometric properties, provide benchmarking data
from a large faith-based healthcare system, and investigate relationships between
spiritual climate and other predictors of patient safety and job satisfaction.Cross-sectional
survey study of US healthcare workers within a large, faith-based health system.Seven
thousand nine hundred twenty three of 9199 eligible healthcare workers across 325
clinical areas within 16 hospitals completed our survey in 2009 (86% response rate).
The spiritual climate scale exhibited good psychometric properties (internal consistency:
Cronbach α = .863). On average 68% (SD 17.7) of respondents of a given clinical area
expressed good spiritual climate, although assessments varied widely (14 to 100%).
Spiritual climate correlated positively with teamwork climate (r = .434, p < .001)
and safety climate (r = .489, p < .001). Healthcare workers reporting good spiritual
climate were less likely to have intentions to leave, to be burned out, or to experience
disruptive behaviors in their unit and more likely to have participated in executive
rounding (p < .001 for each variable).The spiritual climate scale exhibits good psychometric
properties, elicits results that vary widely by clinical area, and aligns well with
other culture constructs that have been found to correlate with clinical and organizational
outcomes.
Type
Journal articleSubject
HumansCross-Sectional Studies
Job Satisfaction
Spirituality
Psychometrics
Adult
Personnel, Hospital
Benchmarking
Organizational Culture
United States
Female
Male
Patient Safety
Surveys and Questionnaires
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/19458Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1186/s12913-017-2050-5Publication Info
Doram, Keith; Chadwick, Whitney; Bokovoy, Joni; Profit, Jochen; Sexton, Janel D; &
Sexton, J Bryan (2017). Got spirit? The spiritual climate scale, psychometric properties, benchmarking data
and future directions. BMC health services research, 17(1). pp. 132. 10.1186/s12913-017-2050-5. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/19458.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
John Bryan Sexton
Associate Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

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