Sustaining Organisational Excellence During Crisis Through Psychological Contract and Organizational Citizenship- An Analysis in Healthcare Sector

Abstract

Business environment turbulence and challenges posed during the pandemic have transformed the work environment radically. Global healthcare aims to combine emerging health information technology, medical research, and science with highly dedicated, intrinsically driven, and knowledgeable healthcare practitioners to provide high-quality healthcare services, enhance patient safety, increase the quality-of-service delivery and provide cost-effective healthcare services to patients (Ashtari & Bellamy, 2019). India has approximately 11.55 lakhs registered doctors in the field of modern medicine India's doctors and other medical personnel are short-staffed and underpaid as they deal with the world's deadliest coronavirus outbreak (Abhishek et al., 2020). Though numerous attempts have been made to physically protect medical personnel by providing personal protective equipment (PPE) and other physical facilities, there has been a shortage of research efforts to analyse the medical workers' subjective stress (Shanafelt et al., 2020). Due to COVID-19, stress among healthcare professionals can be very costly and its side effects are evident in the form of exhaustion, aggressive actions, anxiety, increase in blood pressure, loss of self-confidence, lack of job satisfaction, reduction in performance.

Strategic initiatives during crisis along with remote working mode created employee behavioural changes, significantly impacting previously held perceptions about the psychological contract (PC) and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB). Understanding psychological contracts and job relationships will strengthen our understanding of organizational citizenship behaviour. During a crisis like the present Covid pandemic, many of these factors of organizational excellence depend on the re-invention of the HR interventions that re-strengthened the psychological contract and organizational citizenship behaviour. The present research objective is to investigate the elements of organizational excellence in connection to the healthcare profession using psychological contracts and employee citizenship behaviour. The research provides empirical evidence on how organizational excellence can be achieved through the psychological contract and employee citizenship behaviour in the workplace. The data was gathered from both primary and secondary sources. A well-structured questionnaire was created for the objective of collecting primary data. The interview schedule includes questions about healthcare professionals' demographics, socioeconomic status, and occupational status. The data was collected through a survey of doctors and nurses from private hospitals in India. The reliability of each individual factor was assessed by their Cronbach’s alpha values. Regression and Pearson’s Correlation analyses were conducted to determine the significant difference with respect to organizational excellence, psychological contract, and organizational citizenship.

The findings reveal that relational contracts, organizational citizenship behaviour, and organizational excellence, have moderate but positive correlations, whereas transactional contracts are negatively correlated with relational contracts, organisational citizenship behaviour, and organizational excellence. The study contributes to the present frame of literature and provides insight to the professionals working in the healthcare sector for understanding the role of the psychological contract in the establishment of employee behaviour through intervening variables that will lead to organizational excellence. The study has practical implications for government and private hospitals enabling them to accrue benefit from the findings in terms of achieving organizational excellence. HRM methods vary widely, showing a lack of consistency and need to be reconsidered in order to achieve organisational excellence through HRM practices