Descriptive predictors of nursing faculty’s job satisfaction

Abstract

Introduction: Nursing shortages are directly impacted by the growing number of faculty vacancies in the United States. Many factors contribute to these vacancies including age, retirement, compensation, lack of funding for positions, marketplace competition, geographical area, lack of qualified applicants, and workload. The retention of qualified nursing faculty is crucial to the future health care system and to higher education institutions with nursing programs. Identifying work factors that consistently influence faculty members' intentions to remain in academia is crucial to ensuring public health with a robust nursing workforce of the future. The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the literature related to determining job satisfaction and job descriptive work-engagement levels of individuals who are employed as higher education faculty members in the field of nursing.

Description: Retention efforts for nursing faculty, due to shortage, have become necessary to examine how faculty perceive their engagement with teaching. A descriptive, correlational project study design was performed using an invitation to complete an online survey via Qualtrics as a part of a larger study of nursing faculty. This article will examine six predictor variables of the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) and the Job in General (JIG).

Discussion: This study explored the job descriptive index and job satisfaction of faculty in nursing schools as it relates to an assortment of descriptive variables, including demographics, pay, supervisors, rank, peers, and workload reflections. Nursing faculty perceptions of promotion opportunities, salaries, resources, and support play an important role in attracting, hiring, and retaining nursing faculty, as shown by the results of this study. The findings from this study can serve higher education institutions in ascertaining the satisfaction variables that can be altered to attract and retain faculty in nursing.