Workplace culture and teamwork may play a bigger role in keeping nursing home employees satisfied than collective labor contracts, a new study shows.

The research, published last week in Health Care Management Review, investigated the link between labor contracts in more than 60 Italian nursing homes and nurses aides’ job satisfaction.

The study’s authors found that the factors that play into an employees’ satisfaction occurred on both an individual and facility-wide level. Foreign or temporary aides were also found to be more satisfied than other workers.

Among the characteristics that were found to factor into the workers’ satisfaction, such as workplace culture and teamwork, labor contracts did not make the cut.

“Interestingly, aides of the NHs with the contract having the best conditions register a significantly lower level of satisfaction compared to the NHs with the worst contract conditions,” the investigators wrote. “This suggests that organizational factors such as culture, teamwork, and other characteristics, which were not explicitly considered in this study, may be more powerful sources of worker satisfaction than labor contracts.

The researchers suggested that providers consider alternative sources of employee incentives in addition to labor contracts.