Experimenting the Role of Pro-sociality on the Effort and Engagement of Nursing Professionals in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Introduction: The successful performance of the service sector is highly determined by its labour force due to its extreme dependency on human capital. Nursing professionals are the backbone of the entire health system (Banuri and Kefeer, 2016). The prevailing economic crisis has negatively influenced health workers in terms of social and economic aspects (Hu et al., 2020). With the trend of brain drain and existing nursing shortages, public employees often fail to see the prosocial impact of their jobs and many employees are demotivated, burned out, and emotionally fatigued, which had a negative impact on nursing professionals’ engagement in hospitals during the prevailing economic crisis in Sri Lanka. The pro-social motivation was a key factor in the pandemic encouraging employees to be mentally and physically prepared for work, particularly in the health sector (Hu et al., 2020). The problem is whether the effort and engagement of nursing professionals depend on the reward-based objective or pro-social-based objective in an economic crisis or turbulent situations (Banuri and Keefer, 2016; Zarychta et al., 2022). For the first time in the Sri Lankan context, a real effort (envelope-stuffing) task was conducted in the hospitals (Lab-in-Field) to measure the effort level of nursing professionals across three different levels of treatments (Zarychta et al., 2022). Also, the video vignette of a patient considering the social status (Poor vs. Non-poor) was used to investigate the significant difference in terms of treatment. The quality of health care is crucial to derive good health outcomes (Banuri et al., 2018) and it can be reliably measured through this experiment.