Investigation of crisis management perception and organizational trust level of hospital workers in the COVID-19 pandemic process

The COVID-19 epidemic, which is one of the biggest health crises of recent times, has revealed the importance of crisis management to a large extent. In the study, it was aimed to examine the crisis management perceptions and organizational trust levels of hospital workers during the pandemic. This research is descriptive, cross-sectional and correlational. Statistical analyzes were made using a package program called SPSS (IBM SPSS Statistics 26). Frequency tables and descriptive statistics were used in the interpretation of the findings, and "Mann-Whitney U", "Kruskal-Wallis H", Bonferroni correction, Spearman" correlation coefficient analyzes were performed. The population of the study consisted of a total of 4976 employees working in two hospitals affiliated to the Ministry of Health in the province of Bolu, and the sample consisted of 393 hospital workers who worked during the pandemic and volunteered to participate in the research. "Descriptive Information Form", "Crisis Management Scale (CMS)", "Organizational Trust Scale (OTS)" were used as data collection tools. According to the results of the research, it was determined that the Crisis Management Scale total score average of the employees was 2.41±0.56 and the Organizational Trust Scale total score average was 2.82±0.50. When the sociodemographic characteristics of the employees were associated with the perception of crisis management and organizational trust levels, significant differences emerged. It was found that personal characteristics such as age, gender, education level, occupation, and variables such as the hospital, unit, working time in the institution, being cared for by the institution, financial and psychological support, increase in working hours, and appreciation are effective on the crisis management perceptions and organizational trust levels of the employees. (p> 0.05) and positive significant correlations (p> 0.05) between the perception of crisis management and the level of organizational trust. As a result, it has been determined that hospital workers do not find the crisis management practices of their institutions successful in the pandemic process, their organizational trust levels are low, many variables affect this situation, and the success in crisis management may affect organizational trust.