Social Media Policies of Medical Colleges of Pakistan

Introduction: A total of 144 medical colleges are contributing to the country’s progress. Excessive usage of social media is a cause of not only the deterioration of physical and psychological health of medical students, but has also become a defining reason of procrastination and attaining less than ideal grades. Where most western institutes implement strict social media policies in medical schools, those in Pakistan are gravely lacking. Objective: The objective of this research implementation of social media in medical schools of Pakistan and then identify the need to develop such policies. Methods: We conducted qualitative research in which method of data collection was primarily focus group discussions (FGD) of a total of 40 participants from five different medical colleges of Pakistan. The participants included medical practitioners and medical students(n=20) who were further divided into four groups of five participants each. FGD was conducted online. Results: Content analysis revealed seven core themes as point of discussions to be highlighted. Almost all participants were grossly unaware of the importance of social media usage regulation and its implementation in medical schools. Conclusion: At the end of the FGD it was unanimously agreed upon that there must be a uniform and standard social media policy defined by the regulating bodies of medical schools. This research may further be conducted by including policymakers in the sample. KEYWORDS: Social media, policy, medical colleges.

A Spirituality Based Model of Personality Assessment for Managers in Relation to Job Satisfaction, Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Paranoia and the Moderating Role of Workplace Spirituality.

Personality is a very broad and complex phenomenon which has been vastly studied in different domains from diverse perspectives and there is no single perspective where all researchers have a consensus. There are many personality related traits, attitudes and behaviors of organizational concern, but in case of personality, the models are again mainly borrowed from psychology. The major limitation of the models is that they measure the personality in bits and pieces rather than taking a holistic view. Here we need a basic or ontological dimension to take an integrated view of personality. Spirituality as per many scholars is an ontological dimension of personality. The researchers in psychology in general and in management sciences in specific are now giving attention to the subject. The individual as well as the workplace spirituality are very well researched topics now a days. The current study has focused on the exploration of spirituality as a pivotal phenomenon in assessing human personality through its psychometric capabilities. So spirituality can be a phenomenon where the personality can be gauged holistically as personality traits, attitudes and behavioral outcomes can be predicted through it. This will help the organizations to select, develop and retain appropriate employees in a more meaningful way. The theory suggested that the spirituality can be gauged from low to high with different attitudinal, behavioral and transcendental consequences. After extensive literature review of spirituality across different religions especially incorporating the eastern philosophy, which was missing part in current management science literature, a theory and a definition of spirituality was established which was further used as a basis to develop a scale. For this very purpose, in the first study a tool was developed keeping in view the definition of spirituality, and then its validity as well as the reliability were tested. Furthermore to authenticate the validity of the spiritual phenomenon and its psychometric capabilities, the instrument was tested with certain variables related to employees’ personality. In this regard the variables taken constituted an attitude that is Job Satisfaction, a behavior that is OCB and a personality disorder that is Paranoia. To test the role of WPS in nurturing the spirituality at employee level, it was taken as a moderator in the research model. In the first study, the items were collected from multiple sources and an exhaustive list was developed and then by using grounded theory approach the a list of 30 finalized items was developed. Further the instrument was pilot tested on a sample of 100 students and then it was finally tested on a sample of 430 individuals. After reliability analysis the items with unacceptable loadings were eliminated and the list was reduced to 18 items. In the second study, a sample of 600 respondents was selected from 30 cross sectoral organizations. Out of the sample 530 were useful having no missing values. To analyze the data correlation, regression, and SEM techniques were used. The results supported all the hypothesis in general and hence the findings suggested that the low vs. high spirituality have their respective implications, such as employees with high spirituality are more satisfied, high in exhibiting OCB and were less paranoid. Workplace spirituality also moderated the relation between IV and DVs. Furthermore the study has multiple contributions for literature as very fruitful implications for the practitioners while selecting, retaining employees and enhancing their performance.