The contribution of human resources in attaining retention of emergency room nurses through quality differentiation and organizational commitment

Emergency room nurses are in severe shortage, and it is a massive task for Human Resources professionals to retain them, as staffing is among the most expensive activities of Human Resources. In order to offer suggestions to alleviate the ER nurse shortages, Vroom's expectancy theoretical framework was used in order to assess differences in the ratings of organizational commitment and quality differentiation, as measured by the Modified Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (MOCQ), between nurses in the emergency department (n = 30) and the perceived ratings of nurses for these variables by HR recruiters/managers (n = 30) working in the 99 acute care hospitals that belong to the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association (2007).; The relevant findings of this research indicated no statistically significant (P <0.05) relationships between emergency department nurse reported age, education, tenure, tenure with current employer, and survey ratings of organizational commitment or quality differentiation. Likewise, there were no statistically significant (P <0.05) differences in average survey ratings of organizational commitment or quality differentiation by the emergency department nurses as compared to HR managers/recruiters perceived nurse ratings with exception to 4 individual questions (∼20% of all survey questions). The results indicate good congruency between expected and actual ratings of organizational commitment and quality differentiation between emergency department nurses and HR managers/recruiters with a few select areas that may be improved upon as related to emergency department nurse retention.