Nursing Leadership Style

Leadership Style and Job Satisfaction
Nurse managers are leaders who have authority and power within the work environment. Nurse managers influence staff nurses through multifaceted leadership styles. The effects of a nurse managers’ leadership style on staff nurses can be the cause of an unsafe work environment. Nurse managers who have leadership styles such as transformational and transactional influence job satisfaction for staff nurses; whereas, passive-avoidant and laissez-faire are associated with job dissatisfaction.
Transformational leadership is modeling positive behaviors that influence others to reach their full potential. Whereas, transactional leadership is based on a rewards exchange system to maintain the status quo between nurse managers and staff nurses that promotes loyalty and positive job performance (Blais & Hayes, 2016). A quantitative study done over a
Questionnaires and surveys were completed by 466 staff nurses on safety climate and multifactorial leadership of their nurse managers. The study concluded that nurse managers whose behaviors were classified as laissez-faire created a negative socialization environment and “. . . promoted nursing insecurities [that] resulted in nurses who risked being wrong rather than asking for help” (p. 322).
Bormann and Abrahamson (2014) and Merrill (2015) found that nurse managers utilize more than just one type of leadership style, but most have tendencies towards one particular style. Robert-Turner et al. (2014) surveyed 935 pediatric registered nurses in regards to nursing leadership and job satisfaction. Findings revealed having both characteristics of transformational and transactional leadership styles promoted autonomy and distributive justice that indicated an increase in nurse job