NURSES’ PERCEPTION OF THEIR NURSE MANAGERS’ DELEGATION OF RESPONSIBILITIES IN FOUR TERTIARY HOSPITALS

ABSTRACT
Delegation of responsibilities is the organized process that permits the transfer of responsibilities and authority form an executive to the subordinates. This study investigated nurses’ perception of their nurse managers’ delegation of responsibilities in four purposively selected tertiary health institutions in Enugu state, Nigeria: University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, Ituku-Ozalla, Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT) Teaching Hospital, FederalNeuropsychiatryHospital and NationalOrthopedicHospital, all in EnuguState. Six objectives were raised to guide the study. Descriptive survey design was used for the study. A sample size of 300 nurses was drawn from the population of 943 nurses (nursing sisters and senior nursing sisters) in the four tertiary health institutions selected. Pre- tested 54 item researchers developed questionnaire was used for data collection. The Split half method using Cronbatch alpha was employed to test for reliability which yielded 0.895 and 0.959 respectively. Data collected were subjected to descriptive statistic and analyzed using SPSS version 20. T-test and ANOVA were used to test for hypothesis. Results were presented in tables, means and standard deviation. Findings revealed that mean age of the respondents was 38.44 (±6.77) year and nurses involved in this study perceived that their nurse managers adhere to stipulated guidelines/ criteria in delegating responsibilities,which had grand mean of 3.20 ± 1.21, use of nursing job description had grand mean of 3.00 ± 0.76, practice of transfer of authority had grand mean of 2.88 ± 1.03, practice of accountability had grand mean of 3.00 ± 1.32 and also practice of supervision had grand mean of 2.97 ± 0.87 Hypothesis results indicates that there is no significant difference in the nurses’ age and their nurse managers’ delegation of responsibilities, p-value (> 0.05). No significant difference was found in nurses’ perception of their nurse managers’ delegation of responsibilities based on their rank, p-value (0.391 > 0.05). Also no significant difference was found between nurses’ year of experience and their perception of their nurse managers’ delegation of responsibilities, (p-value) of the F statistics are greater than 0.05 level of significance for all the items tested. These results with P-values greater than level of significance (0.05), indicates there is no difference in age, rank and years of experience. However, there is a significance difference in nurses’ perception of their nurse managers’ delegation of responsibility based on their institution,p-value(< 0.05) Based on the findings, suggestions were made for further studies.