Collectivism and Customer Orientation among Nurses: A Case Study in Iran

Abstract

The mission of organizations is to provide good service for the customers. Weakness in building collectivism morale leads to forgetting group needs and subsequently organizational objectives and customer needs and reduces the patients' referral. On the same ground, the present study was carried out to investigate the relationship between collectivism and customer orientation in nurses' staff which is the most effective hospital staff.The present analytical study was conducted in 2013 on a group of 200 nurses in a specialty hospital in Tehran. The instruments for gathering data include nurses' demographic information (gender, age, marital status and work experience), collectivism questionnaire (10 questions in three dimensions of beliefs, values and norms), and the checking list of nursing staff's extent of customer orientation (27 questions in 8 aspects). Data analysis was done by SPSS.19 and Spearman's correlation tests, Chi Square, and single-sample T-test.The results showed that nursing staff had high collectivism morale. Among aspects of customer orientation, the highest and the lowest mean and standard deviation were respectively related to employees' honesty (2/87±0) and employees' appearance (1/71±0/66). There was a significant relationship between the two elements of customer orientation and collectivism (002/0=P). In addition, apart from the two dimensions of service assurance and employees' appearance, significant relationships were observed between other aspects of customer orientation and collectivism.Regarding the relationship between collectivism and customer orientation in nursing staff, it can be said that customer orientation in an organization can be promoted by reinforcing collectivism morale in employees. Offering educational programs for promoting collectivism morale and subsequently promoting customer orientation can lead to providing good customer service.