The association of leadership styles and empowerment with nurses’ organizational commitment in an acute health care setting: a cross-sectional study

Abstract

BackgroundThe current challenges facing healthcare systems, in relation to the shortage of health professionals, necessitates mangers and leaders to learn from different leadership styles and staff empowerment strategies, so as to create a work environment that encourages nursing staff commitment to patients and their organization. This study intends to measure the effects of nurses’ overall perception of the leadership style of their managers, and psychological empowerment on their organizational commitment in acute care units, in National Guard Health Affairs, Riyadh City, Saudi Arabia.MethodsThis was a cross-sectional survey, where the data was obtained from nurses at King Abdulaziz Medical City. Hard copy questionnaires were distributed to 350 randomly selected nurses. Three hundred and thirty two (332) were completed, representing a response rate of 95 %. Three validated survey instruments were used to obtain the data: (1) The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), formulated by Bass and Avolio (1997), (2) The Psychological Empowerment Scale developed by Spreitzer (1995) and (3) The Three-Component Model of Employee Commitment developed by Meyer and Allen (1997). A theoretical model that conceptually links leadership, empowerment, and organizational commitment was used. The SPSS program version 19 was employed to perform descriptive and inferential statistics including correlation and stepwise multiple regression analysis.ResultsOverall most nurses perceived their immediate nursing managers as not displaying the ideal level of transformational leadership (TFL) behaviors. Nurses’ commitment appeared to be negatively correlated with TFL style and perceived psychological empowerment. However, commitment was positively correlated with the Transactional Leadership (TAL) style. Analysis, also, showed that commitment is significantly associated with the nurse’s nationality by region: North American (P = 0.001) and Arab (p = 0.027). The other important predictors of commitment include TAL (P = 0.027), Laissez-faire Leadership (LFL (P = 0.012), and autonomy (P = 0.016). The linear combination of these predictors explained 20 % of the variability of the nurses’ commitment.ConclusionThe study findings suggest that leadership styles and employee empowerment could play an instrumental role in promoting organizational commitment of nurses working in acute health care settings, at least in the Saudi Arabian context.

Relationship between ethical leadership and organisational commitment of nurses with perception of patient safety culture

“…(), Kazemipour and Mohd Amin () and Hsu et al. () also concluded that OC was high in the majority of participants, but other research showed only an average level of commitment in research units (Asiri, Rohrer, Al‐Surimi, Daar, & Ahmed, ; Shoorideh et al., ; Taghinezhad et al., ; Yang et al., ).…”

Leadership style of nurse managers as perceived by registered nurses: A cross-sectional survey

“…6 The external validity of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire has also been established in previous studies conducted in health care organisations. [7][8][9] Each item is rated on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 4 (frequently, if not always). Ratings were summed and divided by the number of items in each sub-scale to derive average ratings.…”

Job autonomy, perceptions of organizational policy, and the safety performance of nurses

“…The hospital environment is rapidly changing in response to increasing unpredictability and uncertainty in the health care industry. In this changing global health care environment, the nurse's job demands complexity and diversity (Asiri, Rohrer, & Al-Surimi, 2016). Since the beginning of the 21st century, numerous deaths, injuries, and disabilities have been reported by hospital workers (Institute of Medicine, 2000;Institute of Medicine, 2004).…”