Mal J Med Health Sci 16(4): 118-125, Dec 2020 118 Malaysian Journal of Medicine and Health Sciences (eISSN 2636-9346) ORIGINAL ARTICLE Job Satisfaction and Motivations of Health Care Workers at Selected Hospitals in Al-Najaf Al-Ashraf City, Iraq Atheer Kadhim Ibadi 1 , Titi Rahmawati Hamedon 2 1 Department of Pharmacy, Kufa Institute, Al-Furat Al-Awsat Technical University, 31001 Kufa, Al-Najaf, Iraq 2 Department of Community Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia ABSTRACT Introduction: Job satisfaction is the positive and negative feelings of the direction of the job provides the workers of the physical, psychological and social benefits compared to what this worker expects, which will have a significant impact on the level of work performance and productivity of work. This study aims to determine the level of job satisfaction of health workers and identify the type of constraints affecting the health workers and determining the importance of incentives that would raise the level of job satisfaction. Methods: A cross-sectional study conducted for the period from October 2017 to April 2018 in four general hospitals in Al- Najaf province. A number of 670 respondents were selected randomly. A self-administrated questionnaire in the Arabic Language was used to collect information after verifying its reliability. Results: This study found that 56.4% have a positive level of job satisfaction and the rest of the respondents believe that there are signs of constraints affecting health workers. On the other hand, there is a significant correlation between the age group and financial & moral support, there is a significant correla- tion between financial & moral support and job relationships, and between human resources and job relationships. Conclusion: there are more than half of the respondents were satisfied with their jobs and 56.1% of respondents were known about constraints affecting the health workers. Finally, 55.1% of respondents were familiar with the incentives that would raise the job satisfaction level. Keywords: Job satisfaction, Motivations, Health workers, Al-Najaf Province Corresponding Author: Atheer Kadhim Ibadi, PhD Email: kin.ath@atu.edu.iq; atheerkadhimibadi@yahoo. com Tel: +9647801514192 INTRODUCTION Health workers represent the largest share of workers in health care services, the improvement of the quality of health care services and its availability is affected significantly by the health workers function. On the other hand, the effectiveness of health systems strengthening efforts is affected by health worker satisfaction that is a clear limitation (1). Worker motivation is one of the many factors which are considered very important in determining health worker performance, another means can say is the individual's degree of desire to exert and preserve an efforts to achieve the objectives of the organization (1, 2). The positive or negative evaluative judgments of people make about their jobs are conceptualized are called Job satisfaction (3). Satisfaction is defined as the appropriateness of a job and is a standard parameter along a continuum from a positive situation to negative. Psychologists have recognized between overall job satisfaction in their strategy, as the opinion one has expressed about one's job as a whole and or side of satisfactions (4). Overall satisfaction is the estimation of manifestations of one job such as supervision, promotions, salaries, work assignments, or co-workers, for example, workers who are making up the Job Descriptive Index (5). Many researchers around the world have concerned about the issues of job satisfaction because it is connected with the level of health services. For years, researchers have been studying factors that affecting the job satisfaction of health workers in health jobs by focusing on environmental factors of work and worker factors (6). Health workers are the biggest human resource elements in organizations of healthcare, and consequently, they have a crucial impact on the level and type of care and disease progression of the patient. Job performance is checking frequently in light of work attitudes like organizational commitment and job satisfaction (7). Attitudes of the health workers according to their jobs, and commitment of their organizations have been convincing to researchers because of their