Pay practices and safety organizing: Evidence from hospital nursing units

Our understanding of how highly reliable care delivery is brought about remains elusive, in part, because there is limited evidence regarding the organizational practices that enable safety organizing-the behaviors and processes underlying high reliability.

Because safety organizing relies on discretionary effort and lowering barriers to sharing expertise and discussing threats to safety and errors, we investigate three pay practices and their effects on information sharing and, in turn, safety organizing. Specifically, we examine average pay level, minimum pay rates, and pay dispersion on nursing units and their relationship with information sharing and safety organizing.

Cross-sectional analyses of survey data from 1,461 registered nurses in 45 nursing units in three Midwestern hospitals on safety organizing linked to administrative data on pay practices from the organization's human resource systems. Pay data and survey responses were aggregated to the nursing unit level. PROCESS and structural equation modeling were used to simultaneously test for direct and indirect effects of pay variables on information sharing and safety organizing.

PROCESS and Mplus path analysis indicated that paying a higher minimum rate in the unit and having lower pay dispersion have indirect, desirable associations with safety organizing through information sharing.

Pay practices can help organizations enhance safety organizing. In particular, higher pay rates for the lowest level nurses and lower pay dispersion among nurses are associated with unit-level information sharing and safety organizing.

Having pay practices associated with lower within-unit variation and higher pay for the lowest paid members of a unit may be viable strategies for greater information sharing and safety organizing.