The modern working environments of healthcare organizations are characterized by high demands in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, quality and safety of the services provided. At the same time, however, healthcare professionals are faced with high workloads, understaffing and lack of material resources (Galanis et al., 2021; Lasater et al., 2020; Moghadam et al., 2021). Healthcare professionals report being dissatisfied and exhausted from their work, also experiencing high levels of stress, depression and turnover intention (Galanis, Moisoglou, et al., 2023; Galanis, Moisoglou, Malliarou, Papathanasiou, Katsiroumpa, Vraka, Siskou, Konstantakopoulou, et al., 2024; Lenzo et al., 2021). In turn, increased depression, anxiety and stress are associated with a deterioration in the quality of working life of healthcare employees (Barbagianni et al., 2023). High rates of dissatisfaction and burnout are leading healthcare professionals, and nurses in particular, to quit quitting, a new phenomenon that emerged in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic (Galanis, Katsiroumpa, Vraka, Siskou, Konstantakopoulou, Katsoulas, Moisoglou, et al., 2024). The phenomenon, however, affects employees across the business spectrum (Harter, 2022), where employees do not resign from the job, but choose to remain and reduce their performance by providing minimal services, just barely enough to avoid being fired.
An important tool that can help employees in their demanding working environment is the organizational support they receive either at the level of the work department or at the organizational level. According to Eisenberger and his colleagues, who developed the theory of perceived organizational support, the employee believes that the organization he/she works for values his/her contribution and cares about his/her well-being (Eisenberger et al., 1986). Specifically, the elements that make up the perceived organizational include organizational rewards in recognition of greater effort in achieving organizational goals, favorable working conditions, helping the employee to perform his/her tasks effectively even if he/she makes mistakes, managing stressful situations and also the support he/she receives from the supervisor (Eisenberger et al., 1986; Kurtessis et al., 2015; Rhoades & Eisenberger, 2002). When healthcare employees receive higher organizational support, then they experience higher job satisfaction, lower burnout and turnover rates, better psychological well-being, higher job commitment, develop innovative behavior and the quality of care provided improves. (Galanis, Moisoglou, Papathanasiou, Malliarou, Katsiroumpa, Vraka, Siskou, Konstantakopoulou, et al., 2024; Gupta et al., 2016; Pahlevan Sharif et al., 2018; Qi et al., 2019; Tang et al., 2023).
The benefits of organizational support are not only limited to the health sector, but also occur in other service workplaces such as education or other areas of business. Relevant studies in the above work sectors have shown that organizational support is associated with employee satisfaction and reduced burnout, high levels of affective and normative commitment, reduced risky creative behavior but increased safe creative behavior, promotion the acceptance of new technologies perhaps by relieving the stress associated with fear of failure and increasing intrinsic motivation to look for ways to perform better (Eisenberger et al., 2020; Gutiérrez et al., 2017; Lee et al., 2024; Tuna & Aslan, 2018; Wen et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2021).
Therefore, the use of reliable and valid tool will help organizations, regardless of their sector of activity, to measure the degree of perceived organizational support of their employees, in order to proceed to appropriate improvement interventions.
In this context, we examined the psychometric properties of the “Perceived Organizational Support” (POS) scale (Eisenberger et al., 1997) in Greek language.