The effect of structural empowerment on psychological ownership of unit charge nurses and mediating role of organizational trust

This descriptive correlational study was conducted to reveal the effect of the structural empowerment of unit nurses on their psychological ownership and the mediating role of organizational trust. The study was carried out in two stages. In the first stage of the study, the validity-reliability study of the Psychological Ownership Scale was carried out in a university hospital with 71 nurses and unit nurses. In the analysis of the data, confirmatory factor analysis was used for construct validity, Cronbach's Alpha coefficient for reliability and test-retest comparison paired t-test was used. Cronbach Alpha was found to be 0.859. The second phase of the study was carried out at 11 Ministry of Health Hospitals and two university hospitals in Ankara. The sample of the study consisted of 225 unit charge nurses working in these hospitals. Data were collected with the Introductory Information Form, the Structural Empowerment Scale, the Psychological Ownership Scale, and the Organizational Trust Scale. In the analysis of the research: Pearson Correlation, Spearman Correlation, Independent Sample T-Test, Mann Whitney U test, One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and Post-hoc tests (Tukey, LSD), and Kruskal Wallis Test were used for different analysis between more than two groups. The total average score of the unit charge nurses was 79.07±12.30 on the Structural Empowerment Scale, 25.64±5.40 on the Psychological Ownership Scale, and 195.23±36.50 on the Organizational Confidence Scale. A statistically significant positive correlation was found between organizational trust and psychological ownership (p<0.05). A statistically significant positive correlation was found between the structural empowerment of the nurses in charge of the unit and organizational trust (p<0.05). It has been found that organizational trust has a mediating effect on the effect of structural empowerment of the nurses in charge of unit on their psychological ownership. In line with the results of the study, suggestions were made to the nurse managers to increase the structural empowerment, organizational trust, and psychological ownership of the unit charge nurses.