An organizational tool to enhance work motivation--Part I.

Increasingly, physicians, in both primary care and specialties, are gathering together into partnerships, single or multispecialty group practices, corporations, and HMOs. Many of physicians are becoming salaried employees of these organizations. As this trend increases, the physician, once pictured as an autonomous entrepreneur and decision-maker, is giving way to the salaried physician-employee, subject to the management and hierarchical structure of organizations. In the first of two articles, the author lays the background for the need for job satisfaction surveys of salaried physicians.