Work-family Conflict: The Role of Organizational Supportive Perception in Turnover Intention: Case study of Nurses of Tehran's Hospitals

In recent year's significant attention has been devoted to the interference between individual's family and work roles, which has been studied under the general rubric of work-family conflict (WFC). Conflict occurs because our needs are unmet or because our needs are inconsistent with or in opposition to the needs of others. The potential for conflict to arise in a hospital setting is considerably higher due to the complex and frequent interactions among the nurses and other employees and the variety of roles they play. Specialization and organizational hierarchy often add to the territorial conflicts in hospitals. Because of numerous interactions between nurses and customer's organization in hospitals; the employees (nurses) have important role in quality of serving to customers. In this article we are going to investigate relationship of organizational supports, work-family conflict and intention turnover using a sample of nurses in Tehran hospitals. A quantitative research approach was used to explore how Iranian hospital nurses perceive conflicts at work. Sample consisted of 490 nurses (male and female) working in selected hospitals in Tehran and method was simple random. LISREL and SPSS were used to data analysis. Finding show that how nurses perceive conflict influences how they react to it. Sources of conflict are embedded in the characteristics of nurses and the nursing system, but at the same time these characteristics can be seen as strategies to resolve conflict. The results of the path analysis indicate that organizational support alleviates nurses' conflict and reduces turnover intention and work-family conflict and family-work conflict positively correlate with turnover intention. We finally recommend that as conflict can destroy individual nurses as well as the nursing system, we must act to control it effectively. It is recommended that further research be carried out to explore conflict management and retention of key staff in clinical settings.