The Relationships Among Leadership Style, Safety Climate, Emotional labor and Intention to Stay for Clinical Nursing Staff in Taiwan

Purpose:

Nurses shortages is global issues, stable nursing workforce and improving nursing practice environment are important for the current policy of retention. Organizational factors are becoming more important for intention to stay among nurses. The purpose of the study was to identify the relationships among leadership style, safety climate, emotional labor, and intention to stay for nursing staff in Taiwan.

 

Methods:

A cross-sectional research design was conducted in this study. Subjects were selected by using a purposive sampling method. A satisfactory reliability and validity structured-questionnaire was used to collect data and completed by 202 subjects with a response rate of 73.3%.

Results:

The finding indicated that most of the nurse staff intent to stay in nursing workforce (the mean score was 3.27 out of a possible score of 5; SD = 0.74) and 46.5% nurses staff express higher degree of intention to stay. Leadership style (r= 0.31, p<0.01) and safety climate (r=0.48, p<0.01) revealed positive relationships with intention to stay; emotional labor revealed a negative relationship with intention to stay (r= -2.52, p<0.01). The finding of multiple regression analysis indicated that nurses staff working experience (β= -0.24, t= -352, p=0.01, 95% CI= -3.89 to -1.09), leadership style (β=0.31, t=4.64, p<0.01, 95% CI=0.05 to 0.11), safety climate(β=0.48, t=7.78, p<0.01, 95% CI=0.11 to 0.18) and emotional labor (β= -0.25, t= -3.68, p<0.01, 95% CI= -0.05 to -0.02) were significant predictors of intention to stay and explained 32.9 % of the total variance. 

 

Conclusion:

Job related emotional labor is recognized in this study which can contribute to developing a program to decrease first-line nurses emotional stress. Besides, based on our findings, we suggest that create positive workforce, effectiveness of leadership style, culture of safety climate should be established.