Dentist job motivation and satisfaction- development of a measure

A key question facing health service researchers is how incentives can be structured so that agents who work within the health service are motivated to use its resource to achieve the best possible outcome. As well as financial incentives, moral, professional and social inducements are thought to be important. Thus motivation rather than incentive is a lead concept; and motivation is what an incentive seeks to elicit. Motivation is the willingness to exert high levels of effort conditioned by the effort's ability to satisfy some individual need. Job satisfaction is an associated, but distinct concept. Whilst scales of job satisfaction among dentists have been developed, there has been no work on job motivation. Objectives: to develop a measure of job satisfaction and motivation in order to explore differences between the two concepts. Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 12 UK dental practitioners were undertaken. Statements related to elements of job motivation and satisfaction were combined with items relating to job satisfaction taken from the Dentist Satisfaction Survey (Shugars et al, 1990). The questionnaire also included attitudinal statements about how the dentist felt about their current job situation. Each item was rated by a 5 point Likert scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The questionnaire was completed by 30 dental practitioners in the North-West of England. 25 dentists also completed repeat questionnaires. Results: Item analysis led to several items being removed from the measure, where means, standard deviations and item total correlations reduced internal reliability. The resulting questionnaire measured job satisfaction (34 items, Chronbach's alpha=0.95), job motivation (30 items, Chronbach's alpha=0.93) and attitudes towards current job situation, Chronbach's alpha=0.92). Test/re-test result showed high reliability (r=0.825). Conclusion: A highly reliable measure of core job constructs has been produced, to be applied and further tested in a larger UK dental practitioner population.