Creative and Extra-Role Performance of Nurses in Pakistani Healthcare Sector

Abstract

The healthcare sector of Pakistan is facing severe challenges such as communicable and non-communicable diseases, hectic job timings of healthcare professionals, low nurses to doctors, nurses to population, and doctors to population ratios. The shortage of nurses is a main cause of many other health issues in Pakistan. As the healthcare history of Pakistan reveals the failure of the Government of Pakistan in coping with the shortage of nurses, therefore there is a dire need to suggest the concerned authorities from various aspects through which they may get better performance from the existing nurses. From the perspective of human resource management, these problems can be solved by providing Idiosyncratic deals (I-deals) to healthcare professionals. Following the social exchange phenomenon, the pill I-deals would promote the creative and extra-role performance of healthcare professionals to combat these issues. Given that, this study investigates the mechanism between I-deals and creative and extra-role performance by considering the deontic justice and displaying aggression as mediating variables. The moderating role of self efficacy and cyberloafing between, the association of I-deals and deontic justice, and the association of I-deals and display aggression was also examined. Data were collected by using the cross-sectional time-lagged study design from the nurses and their immediate supervisors, i.e., doctors and head nurses serving in Pakistani public and private hospitals. Supervisors rated the creative and extra role performance of nurses working with general patients and the victims of novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Data were analyzed through the IBM SPSS® software, IBM SPSS AMOS® software, and JAMOVI software. We found that I-deals significantly and positively influence the nurses' deontic justice and creative and extra-role performance (voice behavior, creative performance, and organizational citizenship behavior) while significantly and negatively influence their display aggression. Further, we found that deontic justice significantly and positively influence the nurses' creative and extra-role performance. Similarly, although display aggression significantly and negatively affects the creative performance but does not significantly influence the nurses' voice behavior and organizational citizenship behavior. Therefore, the mediation analyses, conducted using the bootstrap technique, revealed that deontic justice mediates the associations of I-deals and creative and extra-role performance. In contrast, display aggression just mediates the association of I deals and creative performance. On the contrary, the moderating role of self-efficacy and cyberloafing on the association between I-deals-deontic justice and I-deals-display aggression was also found statistically significant. Consequently, the findings suggest that the top management of hospitals should offer I-deals to nurses to get creative response. This study adds to the debate that the COVID-19 pandemic can be coped from behavioral perspective, and contributes to a growing body of knowledge on the implications of nursing management and behavioral sciences in a non-Western context.