Evaluation of nurses' organizational commitment level: A meta analysis study

The aim of the study is to assess the relevant study results through meta-analysis method to determine organizational commitment levels of the nurses working at hospitals according to the subscales of affective, continuance and normative commitment and to explore the effect of some variables upon these subscales. The literature search of the study was performed between the 1st of April and the 1st of September, 2019 through the databases of Business Source Complete, ERIC, Medline, Ulakbim, Taylor & Francis, SpringerLink, Proquest Dissertation, Pubmed, Dergi Park Akademik, Wiley Online Library, Science Direct, Scopus, Elsevier, Sage Journal, Türk Tıp Dizini, YÖK Tez Merkezi, Google Scholar and Karadeniz Technical University Library. For the analysis of the data; Comprehensive Meta Analysis Version 2 and Review Manager 5.3 program were used. The study was done with 70 studies that investigated nurses' organizational commitment in relation to the three subscales among the 466 studies obtained from the databases. In the studies reviewed; nurses' affective, continuance and normative commitment levels were found to be moderate according to the results of five point and seven point likert scales. Besides; as a result of the meta-analysis it was seen that continuance and normative commitment levels of those nurses working at private hospitals were higher than those working at public hospitals and continuance commitment levels of those nurses with post-graduate degrees were higher than those nurses with bachelor's degrees, associate degrees and vocational high school degrees. However; nurses with bachelor's degrees demonstrated lower levels in all subscales than those with associate degrees. Also, they showed lower levels in affective commitment than those with post-graduate degrees. Nurses' gender and marital status did not affect their affective, continuance and normative commitment levels. As a conclusion; it may be done more analytical and meta-analysis researches to investigate such variables that influence nurses' organizational commitment levels as hospital type, educational status. Besides; conditions that restrict affective commitment level of nurses with bachelor's degrees can be improved and professional policies and plans that will enhance their organizational commitment can be designed.