Interaction Effects Of Risk Communication And Risk Perception On Task And Contextual Performance

Hospitals in Ghana have excessively become the conduit through which nurses get nosocomial infections(NIs).Consequently,effective Infection Prevention and Control(IPC)measures are essential for ensuring the delivery of quality healthcare.Nevertheless,despite the presence of these codified regulations,efforts to ensure the reduction of the rate of recurrence of NIs have not generated sufficient results.Evidence indicates that this is attributable to poor adherence to preventive behaviors of NIs.Prior studies have demonstrated that the interaction between risk communication and risk perception facilitates the adoption of NIs preventive behaviors,which in turn,considerably contribute to the improvement of workers’ performance.Despite the significance of risk communication and risk perception of NIs in prompting preventive behaviors,which then results in enhancing nurses’ performance at work,no single study,to the best of the researcher’s knowledge,has been conducted to examine the concurrent relationship of risk communication and risk perception in predicting NIs preventive behaviors,and preventive behaviors in predicting nurses’ performance of work roles in Ghana and beyond.In furtherance to this,individuals who are efficacious are more likely to engage in preventive health behaviors after obtaining health risk information,and efficacious people have a higher intention to engage in preventive actions when they perceive a bigger risk.This reveals a moderating role of selfefficacy.Yet,research evaluating the moderating role of self-efficacy in health risk research within the Ghanaian context remains on the fringes of current literature.The study aimed to examine the interaction between Risk Communication and Risk Perception of Nosocomial Infections,and their effects on Task and Contextual Performance in nurses.It further aimed to examine whether Risk Communication and Risk Perception can prompt nurses to adopt Preventive Behaviors of Nosocomial Infections(NIs Preventive Behaviors)and whether the NIs Preventive Behaviors relates with their Task and Contextual Performance.As these predictions were supported,the study aimed to examine the mediation effect of NIs Preventive Behaviors in the impacts of Risk Communication and Risk Perception on Task and Contextual Performance.The study further examined how Self-efficacy moderates the mediation relationship.The study was carried out in three purposefully selected major government hospitals in the Accra Metropolitan Assembly.This study adopted a cross-sectional quantitative research design and questionnaire survey technique to collect data from nurses.The study further employed a proportionate stratified random sampling technique to draw a sample size of 749.9.However,considering the possibility of non-response,20% of the sample size was added to the sample size,making an overall sample size of 899 participants.Out of the 899 nurses who were approached to fill out the questionnaires,878(96.6%)nurses participated in the study,however,874 questionnaires were used for the data analyses because four participants were excluded due to incomplete responses.This study employed Statistical Package for Social Sciences(SPSS)v.23 and STATA 13 in analyzing the data.Structural Equation Modeling was employed in testing the hypotheses in the conceptual model of the study.Additionally,to analyze the significance of the mediation effects,a bootstrapping approach by using 1000 bootstrap samples with 95% biascorrected confidence intervals was employed.To explore the moderation effect,the study used hierarchical regression base moderation analyses.First,the findings on the interaction between Risk Communication and Risk Perception of nosocomial infections revealed positive bidirectional relationship between the two variables.In other words,Risk Communication had a positive impact on Risk Perception and vice versa.The results provide a thorough understanding of how nurses’ risk perception of nosocomial infections(NIs)is shaped by effective risk communication.From this perspective,the greater exposure to information about NIs is expected to increase the nurses’ risk perception of NIs.Risk Perception,on the other hand,plays a key role in the formulation of an effective risk communication strategy.Risk perception reflects the public’s true preferences and fundamental values regarding risk,and though experts are endowed with more knowledge about risks,the laypersons can enrich views of experts by adding more important knowledge and information for the formulation of effective risk communication strategy.The findings also revealed that the nurses’ confidence in the government as the information source was the strongest contributing factor to effective risk communication.This implied that risk communication strategy,no matter how carefully designed or implemented,will fail to equip individuals at risk to make informed decisions to safeguard their lives from dangers,if they do not trust the information source which is the government.Second,the findings on the interaction effects of Risk Communication and Risk Perception on Task and Contextual Performance revealed that the interaction of Risk Communication with Risk Perception led to its positive effect on Task and Contextual Performance.This implied that Risk Perception plays a vital role in the impact of Risk Communication on Task and Contextual Performance,while Risk Communication plays a vital role in the impact of Risk Perception on Task and Contextual Performance.Besides,the results on the Task and Contextual performance opened up an interesting issue about how nurses perform their roles at work.It was deduced that the effect of Risk Communication and Risk Perception on Task Performance is comparatively more than its effect on Contextual Performance.Apparently,nurses are more constantly exposed to NIs in their task roles than in their contextual roles.This constant exposure results in a high-risk perception of NIs;as a result,Task Performance tends to involve more risk communication.Third,the findings on the mediation effect of preventive behaviors of nosocomial infections(NIs Preventive Behaviors)in the impacts of Risk Communication and Risk Perception on Task and Contextual Performance provided support for a positive connection of Risk Communication and Risk Perception with NIs Preventive Behaviors.This implied that Risk Communication and Risk Perception prompt nurses to adopt NIs Preventive Behaviors.Likewise,there were positive relationships between NIs Preventive Behaviors and Task and Contextual Performance.After introducing NIs Preventive Behaviors as a mediator,the standardized coefficients indicated that the influences of Risk Communication and Risk Perception on Task and Contextual Performance were reduced but significant.As a result,the findings indicated that NIs Preventive Behaviors was a partial mediator of the Risk Communication and Risk Perception-Task and Contextual Performance relationship.Furthermore,the results of the bootstrapping approach for the significance of the mediation effect provided evidence that NIs Preventive Behaviors significantly mediated the effects of Risk Communication and Risk Perception on Task and Contextual Performance.Fourth,the findings on the moderation effect of Self-efficacy on the impacts of Risk Communication and Risk Perception on NIs Preventive Behaviors confirmed that self-efficacy is significant and positive moderator of this relationship.In other words,with the presence of effective risk communication and risk perception,nurses who are efficacious have a high level of confidence in their ability to approach(rather than avoid)new tasks,such as Preventive Behaviors.Based on the above-described major findings,the research recommends hospital human resource managers collaborate with the government to collect data on nurses’ risk perception in order to incorporate it into the development of an effective risk communication strategy and enhance nursing performance.Strengthening the nurses’ confidence in the government as the information source should be a top priority so that nurses can rely on all disseminated risk information by the government.Hospital management,nursing policy makers and the government at large should make personal protective equipment available and train nurses on how to use them appropriately.They should ensure that stringent measures are also put in place to compel nurses to adhere to these infection preventive practices.The study recommends that training programs can be organized to teach nursing managers how to enhance nurses’ self-efficacy through strategies such as verbal persuasion.Lastly,the study recommends that Risk communication with risk perception is a good combination to enhance preventive health behaviors as well as nurses’ performance in hospitals;thus,more empirical evidence is needed to confirm this.