Leadership Styles and Nurses’ Job Satisfaction

Article Summary: “Leadership Styles and Nurses’ Job Satisfaction. Results of a Systematic Review”

In healthcare organizations, leadership results major because it affects all actors interacting (nurses, patients, doctors, families, employees) and determine quality indicators of health services.

So, why centered the study in nurses? Because they represent the largest professional body of workers within healthcare systems, playing a key role in quality standards, patient satisfaction, and employee turnover.

The cited article studied nurses, job satisfaction, and leadership styles in organizations throughout the systematic review of 12 studies – over 11,813 revised in English and Italian – showing that leadership styles linked nurses to job satisfaction in an 88%. 

The research question included (a) nurses working in hospitals, (b) uses of diverse leadership styles by nurse coordinators/managers/leaders, and (c) the effects of nurses’ satisfaction.

The leadership styles analyzed were:

• Transformational: these leaders exert charismatic influence and effective communication.  They build valuable relationships, motivate & stimulate employees, fostering loyalty towards a common goal that improves job satisfaction, morale, and productivity.

• Transactional: this style focuses on recognition, rewards, punishment (depending on employee’s performance), and lack of cooperation & trust, representing poor-ethical leaders applying excessive control over employees.

• Laissez-faire: as a subset of the Transactional style, these leaders avoid responsibilities & involvement. It is a real absence of leadership, representing the most passive style.

• Servant: the focus is on professional growth and improving the services they provide. This leads to teamwork, sharing decision making, and acting with ethical behaviour. A sense of building community by sharing power and concentrating in others.

• Resonant: these leaders have a great level of emotional intelligence, empathy, and self-management of emotions, building positive relations and commitment among them.

• Passive-avoidant: These leaders also avoid responsibilities and altercations, lacking  control and clear directions.

• Authentic: These leaders are honest and direct, non-authoritarian, ethical, and transparent employing self-awareness, moral vison, and balanced processing, building symmetrical relationships.

Although a perfect leadership style does not exist since every human interaction and group is different, the best results were for transformational style, followed by authentic, resonant, and servant styles. On contrary, the worst results were related to passive-avoidant and laissez-fair styles. The biggest impact appreciated by nurses was the promotion and support of teamwork by the leader, usually followed by transformational style, spending time teaching and coaching nurses, and providing open bi-directional communication, leading to a search of efficiency and effectiveness of organizational goals and patient care, resulting in better outcomes to all  the individuals involved.

The challenge for leaders is to focus on promoting and improving teams’ professional and technical competencies (more objective goals) while also encouraging morale and job satisfaction (subjective goals), because they influence the psychological state of nurses who develop better abilities and performance under positive leadership. For nurses, respect and having an effective communication – with confident feedback – is  key to job satisfaction.

 

After reading the article, I thought about the different medical care and treatment I have received by healthcare professionals and how different it was comparing public & private sector; not only leadership influenced quality standards, but also number of patients treated per shift, the availability of medical supplies, and hourly wages & salaries – among many other factors – seemed to increase or decrease staff job satisfaction. There is no doubt that leadership is important, but having parameters to compare against can also influence job satisfaction rates.

Article:

Speccia, M. L., Cozzolino, M. R., Carini, E., Pilla, A. D., Galletti, C., Ricciardi, W., & Damiani, G. (2021). Leadership Styles and Nurses’ Job Satisfaction. Results of a Systematic Review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/4/1552