This study was designed to assess the types of shared service arrangements and the degree of commitment as evidenced by the incorporation of policy statements displayed toward the sharing concept evident in the Dallas-Fort Worth hospitals. The purpose of this research, then, was to identify and evaluate present utilization of shared arrangements to establish a base for comparison and recommendations for future participation by the various categories of hospitals. The conclusions derived from the findings include the following: 1. Shared services promise to be a continuing factor in the operation of the health care industry in the future. 2. Governmental influence and regulation will expand into every area of health care. Hospital administrators must take every opportunity to contribute input to the formulation of these regulations. 3. The selection of products or services to be shared must be handled in a systematic manner complete with a control system to assure continued quality levels. 4. Standardization of product specifications is the single largest obstacle to the expansion of the shared service concept. This obstacle can be removed only through the committed involvement of the medical community. 5. The sharing of services, rather than products, appears to have great potential in terms …

The correlates of organizational communication to other organizational constructs have been scarcely researched. Two constructs of interest to management researchers and practitioners are job performance and job satisfaction. This interest arises from the fact that the quality of organizational life and effectiveness may be determined by the quality of the two constructs. This study investigates the moderating influence of organizational communication on two models involving the variables of performance and satisfaction: (1) the relationship between performance and satisfaction and (2) the relationship between the congruence of the individual and the job with performance and satisfaction. Organizational communication is assessed in terms of ten dimensions: trust in superiors; influence of superiors; accuracy of information; desire for interaction; communication satisfaction; overload and underload information; and upward, downward, and lateral communication. Executives, research and middle management people, office workers, and manufacturing individuals from two firms provided the data for the study. An expected moderating influence was evaluated through differential validity or differential predictability, as appropriate, and moderated regression analysis. Organizational communication received very weak support as a moderator of both the relationship between the target variables of performance and satisfaction and the individual-job congruence association with the same target variables. Accuracy of information, …