The Meaning of the Employee Engagement of Thai Public Hospitals under the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH)
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Abstract
The objectives of this study are to explore the meaning of the employee engagement of Thai public hospitals in the Thai context and to investigate the factors that promote the employee engagement of Thai public hospitals under the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH). This study employed a qualitative phenomenological approach. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and participatory observations with 13 medical doctors, 15 general support employees, 15 medical support employees, and 15 nurses from three different hospitals across MOPH-owned hospitals, including community, general, and regional hospitals. Conventional content analysis, the frequency count occurrences of words, along with the five stages of inductive data analysis were applied for the analysis of the data.
The findings revealed 5 common components of the meaning of employee engagement, including positive emotion, wholehearted effort, organization accomplishment, desired behavior, and stay. The findings explored 16 factors that promoted employee engagement, which were categorized into 3 levels, including individual, group, and organization levels. The five factors at the individual level were personal resources, feeling important, relationship with colleagues, prolonged stay, and patient well-being. The three factors at the group level were collaboration, perceived supervisor support, and team work. The eight factors at the organization level included hospital image, job characteristics, family-like work climate, job security, leader, compensation, welfare, and learning and development opportunity.
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