Job satisfaction represents one of the most complex areas facing today’s managers when it comes to manage their employees. Psychiatric nurses must be able to develop caring relations with patients in order to express their professional identity, find meaning and value in their work, and achieve satisfaction with their jobs. The aim of this study is to investigate the relation between job satisfaction and caring behaviors of nursing staff in the governmental psychiatric mental health hospitals at Cairo, “Kasr El Eini, El Abbassia, El Khanka, and Helwan Mental Health Hospitals". Design: a descriptive correlational design was utilized for the current study. A sample of convenience of 150 psychiatric staff nurses working in the 4 governmental psychiatric hospitals at Cairo were included. Three tools were utilized in the current study including Socio-demographic Data Sheet, Caring Efficacy Scale, and The Index of Work Satisfaction Questionnaire (with its two parts). The results showed that: there was no statistically significant correlation between the satisfaction with salary and the level of caring behavior. Also there was a statistically significant difference between workload and caring behaviors. And there was a statistically significant positive correlation between job satisfaction and caring behaviors. To conclude, this study supports the conceptual model, which proposed that nurses who believe in their ability to express caring behaviors will experience higher levels of job satisfaction. A relationship was found between confidence to be able to establish caring relations and job satisfaction. Finally, participants’ age, years of experience in psychiatric nursing, and years in the same institution influenced both how nurses perceived their ability to express care and their level of job satisfaction. Further studies was recommended in areas of psychiatric nursing and hospital management to develop strategies on how to value the acts of caring, examining if and what barriers nurses face that affect their provision of caring behaviors, expanding the population to include nurses in the private hospitals would enhance the knowledge and understanding of relationship between the perceived ability to express caring behaviors and job satisfaction.
