Search results

Hospital physician shortages are widely recognized as a national problem in Japan. Although physician job satisfaction has a relationship with service quality and physician turnover, there is no measure to assess Japanese hospital physician satisfaction. This paper aims to establish a measure of job satisfaction for Japanese hospital physicians and evaluated its psychometric performance.

Two cross‐sectional physician surveys were used – a pilot survey, conducted as a self‐administered questionnaire; and a validation survey conducted on‐line.

A total of 82 hospital physicians completed the pilot questionnaire. Factor and reliability analyses produced a 28‐item, 6‐subscale and 2‐global satisfaction scale measure, the Japan hospital physicians satisfaction scale (JHPSS). Results supported the measure's reliability and validity. For the validation survey, 146 hospital physicians completed the online questionnaire. One question item was substituted following factor analysis. Results also displayed the measure's adequate psychometric properties.

Participating physicians were convenience samples, which may not fully represent Japanese hospital physicians.

The JHPSS, a brief questionnaire measuring Japanese hospital physician job satisfaction, should be useful for providing better quality care and improving our understanding of and ability to deal with Japanese hospital workforce issues.

This study aims to investigate the relative weight of financial and non-financial performance measures used to evaluate production managers (such as shop floor managers or foremen) in a modern manufacturing setting.

Using survey data from Japanese factories, the paper examines the association between the choice of profit, cost, and non-financial performance measures with two characteristics of manufacturing systems: interdependence and multi-tasking.

The results indicate that interdependence has a significant and positive association with the importance of profit information, while multi-tasking is associated negatively with the importance of profit information, and positively with non-financial information for performance evaluation.

In recent years, a significant shift has been observed in Japanese production management with many companies now focusing on profit information instead of cost information. For example, the past studies show that large Japanese manufacturing companies are now using micro-profit centres and include profit information when evaluating factories. However, little empirical evidence is available on performance measurement at the shop floor foreman level, and even less is known about the importance of profit information in the evaluation of these lower level managers.