Job satisfaction and guideline adherence among physicians: Moderating effects of perceived autonomy support and job control

Value-based purchasing of physician services aims to incentivize greater adherence to clinical practice guidelines. By increasing job demands, new reimbursement models could adversely affect job satisfaction and, indirectly, clinical performance. Studies of satisfaction-performance associations among healthcare practitioners have yielded inconsistent findings. We investigated whether physicians' perceptions of autonomy support and job control significantly moderate the relationship between practice satisfaction and guideline adherence in a pay-for-performance context. We performed secondary analysis of a study dataset created by merging prospective information on clinical services provided by Rochester (NY)-based primary physicians (N = 156) during the years 2001–2004 with census data on specific characteristics of their ambulatory-care populations, claims-sourced information on attributes of their primary care practices, and survey data on their work-related attitudes. Greater job satisfaction had a significant multivariate association with lower adherence (β = −0.139; p=<.0001) among physicians that perceived low autonomy support from the market-dominant payer organization. For physicians experiencing high autonomy support, a positive satisfaction-adherence association existed (β = 0.105; p=<.0001). Low job control was a negative moderator (β = −0.103; p=<.0001), and high control a positive moderator (β = 0.071; p=<.0001), of the influence of job satisfaction on guideline adherence. Given the limitations of this study, such as the cross-sectional survey data and potential for unmeasured confounding variables, the validity of our findings should be tested by future research. We conclude that payers attempting to over-direct partner physicians can demotivate the satisfied physicians from achieving top-level guideline adherence, thereby squandering opportunities for intrinsic satisfaction to improve guideline adherence. To optimize the potential for job satisfaction to motivate greater guideline adherence, it may be important for payers to be perceptibly more supportive of physicians’ autonomy and sense of job control.