The Mediating Effects of Job Satisfaction on the Association between Doctor-patient Relationship and OCB among Physicians in China

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate OCB among physicians in China and explore whether their job satisfaction mediates the association between doctor-patient relationship (DPR) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Methods: This cross-sectional, questionnaire-based survey was conducted among 1400 physicians in Shaanxi, China in 2014. The subjects were selected using a multi-stage cluster sampling methodology. The self-administered questionnaires included OCB Scale, DDPRQ, and PJSQ. Hierarchical linear regression analysis was used to estimate the effects of job satisfaction on the association between DPR and OCB. Results: DPR negatively predicted four dimensions of OCB, including conscientiousness, sportsmanship, civic virtue, and altruism. DPR was negatively related to five job satisfaction dimensions, namely work satis-faction (WS), promotion satisfaction (PS), reward satisfaction (RS), supervision satisfaction (SS), and envi-ronment satisfaction (ES). WS was positively correlated with conscientiousness and civic virtue; PS and SS were positively related to all four OCB dimensions; RS was positively related with civic virtue and altruism, and ES was positively correlated with conscientiousness and civic virtue. WS and PS partially mediated the association between DPR and conscientiousness; PS and SS partially mediated the relation between DPR and sportsmanship; PS, SS, and ES mediated the association between DPR and civic virtue; and PS, RS and SS partially mediated the relation between DPR and altruism. Conclusion: Job satisfaction mediated the association between DPR and OCB among Chinese physicians. The poor DPR possibly reduce physicians’ job satisfaction, thereby causing a decline of OCB in hospitals. Therefore, DPR improvement and job satisfaction have a great potential to promote physicians’ job perfor-mance in China.