Diversity issues in Nigeria’s healthcare sector: implications on organizational commitment. A cross-sectional study

Introduction

Workforce diversity has a significant impact on the work behaviour and attitudes that employees exhibit in the work environment¹. Diversity of employees depicts a scenario in which different people bring their unique backgrounds, perspectives, values and benefits to the organization².

Assessing diversity among employees is strategic to effectively managing the organization’s human resources and can improve the organizational commitment and satisfaction of employees³. Furthermore, diversity in the workforce improves better decision-making, greater creativity, innovation and greater competitiveness^4–5. Workforce diversity has grown from focusing solely on human demographic characteristics; like race, gender and age, to a much broader meaning that encompasses the whole range of human, physical and cultural differences⁶, and this could influence their levels of job satisfaction.

In the work of Jex⁷, job satisfaction is described as the positive affection of an employee towards the job. According to Shuck et al.⁸, employee satisfaction itself has a direct and indirect influence on individual and organizational performance, including the commitment of employees to work. Job satisfaction, for example, is the best predictor of employee turnover. More so, having a committed workforce is important for achieving organisational performance. Therefore, it is important to produce a committed workforce that would show organisational commitment.

Today's workplace consists of different employees with unique and varied features^9,10. Although, existing literature have discussed workforce components as a determinant of employee commitment¹¹. However, the current literature does not sufficiently explained the employees feelings about diversity in their working environment, and whether diversity in the workforce results in dissatisfaction or lack of engagement, especially within the public health sector of developing economies like Nigeria. Despite that most researchers, such as Osibanjo et al.¹² have been focusing on explaining concepts that enhance understanding of workforce diversity, little is understood about how workforce diversity affects employees’ satisfaction and organisational commitment in the workplace. Studies on the influence of diversity in the workforce on the satisfaction of employees and the organizational commitment in the public health sector in Nigeria are rare in existing literature¹³. This paper therefore aims to examine the influence of diversity in the workforce on organizational commitment and employee satisfaction among selected public health workers in Nigeria, based on the following four hypotheses.

H₁: Employee diversity significantly influences employees’ affective commitment

H₂: Employee diversity significantly influences employees’ continuance commitment

H₃: Employee diversity significantly influences employees’ normative commitment

H₄: Job satisfaction moderates the relationship between workforce diversity and organizational commitment (affective, continuance and normative)

Methods

A survey method was used for data collection.

Results

In terms of demographics of the respondents, 64 (48.1%) were male while 69 (51.9%) were female. The age distribution among respondents was as follows: the majority of respondents (68) were between 18 and 34 years of age, 45 respondents between 35 and 44 years of age, 13 respondents were between 45 and 54, and 7 were 55 or above years (Table 1 and underlying data²³).

Figure 1 shows the model for analysis of multi-variate relationships between diversity of workforce, job satisfaction and employee commitment. The statistical measurement was considered fit based on the following estimates: Chi-square / degree of freedom (Cmin / df) = 1.603, goodness of fit index (GFI)= 0.950, normal fit index (NFI)= 0.892, comparative fit index (CFI)= 0.952, root mean square approximation error (RMSEA)= 0.068. These estimates are considered to be fit based on existing studies^24,25.

Figure 1. Regression path of workforce diversity, job satisfaction & employee commitment.

Analyses revealed varying levels of direct and mediating relationships among the research variables. Specifically, gender and ethical diversity had significant influences on job satisfaction at r = 0.35 (p < 0.05) and r = 0.28 (p < 0.05) respectively. Direct relationships were also statistically established between workforce diversity and organizational commitment in the following ways: gender diversity and affective commitment (r = 0.26, p < 0.05), normative commitment (r = 0.05, p < 0.05); education diversity and normative commitment (r = 0.12); experience diversity and continuance commitment (r = 0.20, p < 0.05). A direct inverse relationship was established between religion diversity and continuance commitment (r = -0.14, p < 0.05). The following mediating relationships were also statistically confirmed: job satisfaction related with affective commitment (r = 0.41, p < 0.05) and normative commitment (r = 0.26, p < 0.05). The results of these data support existing research results^21,26.

Discussion and Conclusion

Researchers like Ashikali et al.²⁷, Ibidunni et al.²⁶ and Hanaysha et al.²⁸ demonstrated that diversity in the workforce promotes creativity, innovative problem solving and productivity. Also, Moon²⁸ confirmed that large organizations use various teams intentionally to solve problems and employed people from a diversity races, ethnicities and experience to shape perspectives in the organization^29,30.

Although arguments for diversity are naturally attractive and somewhat popular, there is little empirical evidence that diversity in the workforce can be used to increase employee engagement, especially in developing economies such as Nigeria. Whether employee diversity influences organizational engagement is an empirical issue that has not been properly tested in Nigeria in the public sector context. This study therefore contains evidence to fill this gap. The results of this study show that gender is the most sensitive factor in the diversity that influences Nigeria's commitment to public health workers. Gender diversity is associated with the affective and normative aspects of the commitment of employees^31,32. These two dimensions of commitment reflect the degree to which employees are emotionally committed to their productivity at work^26,33. The promotion of gender equality at work must therefore be seen as a strategic way to increase the commitment of public health workers in Nigeria.

Our results demonstrate that the diversity of the workforce has a significant impact on the satisfaction and commitment of Nigerian public health professionals. Based on the results of the statistical analysis, the study concludes that there is a relationship between diversity of employees and job satisfaction, diversity of employees and organizational commitment and the influence of work satisfaction on organizational commitment. Therefore, this study has important implications for directing policymakers to ensure that the demographic diversity among public health workers is treated as a strategic part of employee selection. This in turn significantly influences their levels of job satisfaction and commitment to the organization.

Data availability