Job content and pharmacists' job attitudes

The relationships between job content and hospital pharmacists' work attitudes are examined. A 152-item questionnaire was mailed to 507 hospital pharmacists in southeastern Michigan. The questionnaire included measures of job dimensions, psychological states, and personal and work outcomes. Mean scores for 34 subscales consisting of 2-5 related items were computed. Background characteristics were also assessed. Using factor analysis, the respondents were categorized as clinical, inpatient, outpatient, or generalists depending on their reported relative time spent performing 23 nonadministrative job functions. Analysis of variance was performed across the four groups for each subscale; the level of significance was set at 0.001. The response rate was 56%, representing 283 completed questionnaires. The clinical, outpatient, inpatient, and generalist pharmacist groups consisted of 43, 36, 70, and 134 respondents, respectively. There was a prevalent trend in the rank order in which pharmacists in the four groups responded to various subscales. The clinical group had the highest scores for 13 of the 14 subscales that were significantly different across pharmacist groups. Alternatively, in all but one of the significantly different subscales the inpatient group ranked lowest. Because pharmacists in the clinical group consistently scored higher than the other groups on scales measuring components of job enrichment, the authors concluded that the challenge of hospital pharmacy managers is to adapt the positive features of clinical practice to other areas of the profession.