How Nursing Leadership Affects Staff Nurses

How Nursing Leadership Affects Staff Nurses’ Job Satisfaction
Rhonda Rychlik
Queens University

How Nursing Leadership Affects Staff Nurses’ Job Satisfaction
The constant and rapidly changing health care environment dramatically affects nursing practice today. Health care leaders are faced with the problem of achieving their strategic goals while balancing finances, productivity, quality outcomes and employee and patient satisfaction. The health care environment is competitive and chaotic which means constant organizational change to meet the challenges. Today’s changes occur frequently in every organization and to handle and motivate change is one of the leader’s main tasks (Sellgren, Ekvall, & Tomson, 2008, p. 579). The challenges in health care today place pressure on the relationship of nursing leader behavior and staff nurse job satisfaction. The style of the manager can be important for employees’ acceptance of change and in motivating them to achieve a high quality of care (Azaare & Gross, 2011, p. 672).
Effective leadership of nurse managers has been associated with creating a healthy work environment leading to job satisfaction and retention. Health care managers need to address quality of work place issues in order to provide an environment conducive to staff making decisions to remain (Cowden, Cummings, & Profetto-McGrath, 2011, p. 471). Research analysis suggests that nursing leadership style contributes to the creation of a positive or negative work environment and therefore has an effect on nurses’ job