Introduction: Since nurses are regarded as the greatest group of employees offering health services, paying attention towards the role of self-confidence in improving sense of responsibility has high importance. The aim of present study is to determine the relation between self-confidence and responsibility among nurses of hospitals in Ilam medical university.

Materials & methods: Present study is a correlative- descriptive research, whose population consists of all of nurses in hospitals of Ilam medical university during 2014, among which 151 individuals were selected as the sample of study through Cochran's formula with a random sampling way. In order to collect data, standard questionnaire of Farzianpour et al (2012) and Jeremy Gilbert's responsibility evaluation (2010) were applied, whose validity was confirmed by experts and its reliability of 82/0 was determined by Cronbach's alpha. Data was analyzed through descriptive statistics and Pearson's correlation factor and regression analysis in SPSS.

Findings: Obtained findings indicated that self-confidence and its aspects (being important, competence, dominance, and virtue) have a significant relation with nurses' responsibility. Among these aspects, being important had the least relation to responsibility, while dominance and competence had a relative good relation with responsibility, and finally virtue had the most relation to responsibility.

Discussion & conclusions: Results indicate that the current study was in alignment with previous studies. Therefore, in order to improve the sense of responsibility among nurses, it is suggested that managers provide the workplace in such a way that they feel themselves as valuable and efficient to form their self-confidence and establish a professional moral field of work, so that improvement of their responsibility would be achieved.