TO BE, RATHER THAN TO SEEM: THE IMPACT OF SUPERVISOR'S AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ON WORK ENGAGEMENT, JOB PERFORMANCE, AND JOB SATISFACTION IN A POSITIVE HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATION

Moving from a definition of positive organization, in this study the relationship among job resources (i.e., supervisor's responsibility, job autonomy, and perceived organizational support), personal resources (i.e., responsibility toward the task and toward colleagues and collaborators), work engagement, and its positive outcomes (i.e., job performance and job satisfaction) were investigated in an Italian public healthcare organization. Data were collected from 224 healthcare employees who completed a questionnaire to express their evaluations. The aims of the study were: a) to explore the issue of responsibility - a construct still little investigated in the literature - with particular reference to the supervisor's role; b) to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Positive Organization Questionnaire (POQ) and of the other instruments adopted through confirmatory factor analyses; c) to verify the hypothesized relations through a structural equation model with observed variables. Results showed that the scales adopted had satisfactory psychometric properties. Furthermore, according to the JD-R model, job autonomy and perceived organizational support were positively associated with work engagement, which, in turn, was positively associated with job performance and job satisfaction. In this study, supervisor's responsibility is seen as a job resource, however it wasn't directly related with the considered outcomes, but employee responsibility toward the task mediated the relationship between supervisor's responsibility and job performance, like responsibility toward colleagues and collaborators mediated the relationship with work engagement. Finally, job autonomy showed a positive direct effect on job satisfaction. Some limitations and future developments are discussed.