Journal of School of Public Health and

Background and Aim: Responsiveness is of extreme importance in every health system, especially for policy-makers and health managers. Responsiveness relates to how the health system responds to legitimate expectations of the patients regarding non-clinical aspects of health care. Furthermore, justice in an organization requires fair treatment of the patients on the part of the health personnel. In other words, organizational justice relates to how to treat the personnel so that they feel they are treated fairly. The objective of this study was to investigate the responsiveness of hospital as perceived by patients and nurses and the relationship between the responsiveness rate and organizational justice as perceived by nurses in the hospitals.

Materials and Methods: This was a descriptive-analytical study aiming at determining the correlation between responsiveness and organizational justice in 8 elected hospitals (4 private and 4 public) in Isfahan, Iran. The study population was patients and nurses. A total of 320 individuals (160 patients and 160 nurses), selected by stratified random sampling, participated in this study. Two questionnaires, namely the adjusted WHO Responsiveness Questionnaire (for patients and nurses) and the Equity Questionnaire (for nurses), the validity and reliability of both of which had been determined, were used to collect data. The software used for data analysis was SPSS

Results: The overall score (out of 4) of organizational justice was 1.9 0.77, while the mean score of responsiveness as perceived by the nurses and the patients was 2.32 0.54 and 2.48  0.58, respectively. There was no statistically significant difference between the 2 groups with regard to responsiveness, but there was a positive association between responsiveness and organizational justice as perceived by nurses (r = 0.2, p = 0.03).

Conclusion: The variables in the hospitals studied are generally at an intermediate level and there are no statistically significant differences between private and public hospitals. There is no difference in organizational justice between private and public hospitals, but responsiveness is higher in private hospitals as compared to public ones. Thus, the public sector needs to attempt to create more incentives in health professionals in the health sector in order to guarantee higher-quality services and better responsiveness.

  Background and Aim: Social loafing is the phenomenon of people deliberately exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group as compared to when they work alone. People who feel they are being treated unfair in an organization would be more likely to show this phenomenon. This study investigated the social loafing among nurses and its relationship with organizational justice in Tohid Hospital in Sanandaj, Iran.

  Materials and Methods: This was a correlational descriptive-analytical study conducted in 2012. The study population was all nurses working in Tohid Hospital in Sanandaj, Iran. Data were collected using a valid questionnaire. For data analysis SPSS-20 software was used, the descriptive statistics being frequency distribution, mean, standard deviation, and the Spearman, Mann-Whitney, and Kruskal-Wallis tests .

  Results : The highest organizational justice component was found to be organizational justice (0.086 ± 3.39), and the mean of social loafing was higher in comparison with organizational justice. According to the Spearman test, all organizational justice components had inverse relations with social loafing. Only distributive organizational justice was significantly related to social loafing (p<0.05).

  Conclusion: It can be concluded that the personnel are highly sensitive to distributive justice and managers need to create the feeling that the organization has a fair distribution of resources. Hospitals should try to minimize the negative effects associated with loafing by creating an environment that discourages social loafing. One way to achieve this goal is to try to impress the personnel by telling them that their functions are important , such that they feel their job is important and that the role of nurses in connection with the patients is of value and significant.