The Influence of Nurse Managers’Leadership Styles on Staff Outcomes in Eastern Region of Ghana

Abstract

Leadership is a critical determinant of success in any field of endeavour. Nursing is a people-centred profession and therefore the issue of leadership is crucial for success. Nurse Managers‘ leadership styles are believed to be important determinant of nurses‘ job satisfaction, retention and productivity. In the wake of a global nursing shortage, maldistribution, increasing healthcare cost and expanding workload, it has become imperative to examine the role of Nurse Managers‘ leadership styles on staff outcomes. Using the Path- Goal Leadership theory as an organising framework, this study investigated the leadership styles of Nurse Managers and how they influence nursing staff outcomes, namely job satisfaction, intentions to stay and perceived productivity in the Ghanaian context. The study employed a cross-sectional survey design to collect data from a sample 273 nursing staff in five hospitals in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The data was analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 18.0. Descriptive statistics, correlation and regression were the main statistical tools used in the data analysis. The findings show that Nurse Managers used varying leadership styles depending on the situation but were more inclined to the supportive leadership style followed by the achievement-oriented leadership style and participative leadership style. Directive leadership style was the least used by Nurse Managers. Nursing staff exhibited moderate levels of job satisfaction. A weak but significant negative correlation was found between directive leadership style and nursing staff job satisfaction. Nurse Managers‘ leadership styles together statistically explained 29% of staff job satisfaction. Only directive leadership style was not a significant predictor of job satisfaction. Intention to stay at current workplace which is often used as a proxy for staff retention was low (2.64 out of 5) among the nursing staff. More than half (51.7%) of the nursing staff intended to leave their current workplaces, 20% of whom were actively seeking opportunities to leave. A weak but positive correlation was found between supportive,

The Influence of Nurse Managers’ Leadership Styles on Staff Outcomes

participative, and achievement-oriented leadership styles and staff intentions to stay. Nurse Managers‘ leadership styles statistically explained 13.3% of staff intention to stay but only participative leadership style significantly contributed to the predictive power of the regression model. The productivity of nursing staff was generally perceived to be high (8.39 out of 10, SD =1.28) in the last one month. Nursing staff believed that their own productivity had improved by 1.8% over the last six months and they perceive to be 10% more productive than their colleagues on the same unit/ward. Nurse Managers‘ leadership styles jointly explained only a small portion (6.9%) of the variance in perceived productivity. Only achievement-oriented leadership style statistically accounted for 18.4% of the variance in perceived productivity level explained by the Nurse Managers‘ leadership styles. The findings of this study have implications for human resource policy development as well as capacity building of current and future Nurse Managers.