the relationship of organizational commitment with mental health among employees of birjand university of medical sciences

background and aim: the most important component of each organization is its workforce. improving employees’ mental health and commitment is the prerequisites to training a healthy workforce. this study was undertaken to examine the relationship of organizational commitment (oc) with mental health among employees of birjand university of medical sciences, birjand, iran. methods: in this correlational study, 211 employees of birjand university of medical sciences were recruited by using the stratified random sampling method. the data collection tools were the mayer and allen’s organizational commitment questionnaire (ocq) and the goldberg general health questionnaire. the cronbach alpha of these two questionnaires had been reported to be 0.89 and 0.90, respectively. the spss software (v. 18) was used for analyzing the data by conducting the pearson correlation coefficient, the one-way analysis of variance (anova), the tukey post hoc test, and the independent-samples t test at a significance level of less than 0.05. results: the means of participants’ mental health and oc scores were respectively 19.59 ± 10.03 and 57.05 ± 12.37. oc and its domains were significantly correlated with mental health (p < 0.05). however, it was not correlated with participants’ demographic characteristics. on the other hand, there was a significant relationship between mental health and gender (p = 0.001), educational status (p = 0.001), and employment status (p = 0.004). the correlation of different domains of oc with each other was also statistically significant (p < 0.05). conclusion: given the significant correlation of oc with mental health, managers can improve employees’ mental health and productivity through adopting strategies for enhancing their oc.