Can the Federal Baldrige Survey Measure Workforce Well-being in an Academic Health Center?

Area of Science:

• Organizational Psychology
• Healthcare Management
• Workforce Well-being

Background:

• Experts recommend shifting focus from burnout to positive organizational psychology in healthcare.
• Burnout may indicate broader organizational decline.
• The Baldrige survey, typically manager-completed, is now promoted for workforce assessment to gauge positive worksite conditions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the structural validity of the Baldrige survey when completed by an academic health care workforce.
• To determine if Baldrige survey results correlate with an organizational outcome metric in an academic setting.

Main Methods:

• The Baldrige survey was administered to faculty and staff at an academic health center in 2015.
• Confirmatory factor analyses were used to test the survey's validity.
• Responses were correlated with graduates' assessments of departmental educational quality within the School of Medicine.

Main Results:

• The Baldrige survey's structure did not validate when completed by the workforce (RMSEA = 0.086; CFI = 0.829; TLI = 0.815).
• No concepts from the survey correlated with learner-reported educational quality.

Conclusions:

• The Baldrige survey, when used with a workforce, did not effectively measure workforce well-being in an academic health care setting.
• Current use of the Baldrige survey for this purpose is discouraged.