ReviewLeadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review
Section snippets
What is already known about the topic?
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Nursing leadership is called for repeatedly to manage challenging healthcare workplace and workforce issues.
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Considerable research has examined the relationships between specific leadership styles and practices of nursing leaders and outcomes for the nursing workforce.
What this paper adds
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Our results point to outcomes patterns that support claims that relationship or people focused leadership practices contribute to improving outcomes for the nursing workforce, work environments and for productivity and effectiveness of healthcare organizations.
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With little exception, relationally focused leadership practices led to much more frequent and positive outcomes for the nursing workforce and nursing work environments than did other more task focused leadership styles, which included
Search strategy, data sources, and screening
The search strategy included 10 electronic databases CINAHL, Medline, PsychInfo, ABI, ERIC, Sociological Abstracts, Embase, Cochrane, Health Star and Academic Search Premier. Searches included the following keywords – leadership, research, evaluation and measurement – to locate studies published between 1985 and December 2006 (and then updated to May 2009) that examined the outcomes of various styles of nursing leadership. See Table 1 for search strategy.
Inclusion criteria
Titles, abstracts and manuscripts were
Search results
The electronic database search yielded over 34,664 titles and abstracts. Following removal of duplicates, 18,963 titles and abstracts were screened using the inclusion criteria and 1357 manuscripts were retrieved for screening. Of these, 150 manuscripts were specific to nursing leadership and were further sorted into factors associated with developing leadership, outcomes associated with leadership, and the measurement of leadership. Following quality assessment of the 150 nursing studies, 23
Discussion
The findings of this comprehensive review point to a trend in outcomes patterns that support claims that relationship or people focused leadership practices contribute to improving outcomes for the nursing workforce, work environments and for productivity and effectiveness of healthcare organizations. Although similar to findings from Gilmartin and D’Aunno (Gilmartin and D’Aun, 2007), our review adds additional detailed analyses that examine the pattern of leadership styles, (relational or
Conclusion
The findings of this systematic review point to specific leadership approaches that are more effective at achieving positive outcomes for the nursing workforce and for healthcare organizations, than others. Combined with knowledge from other reviews that relational and transformational leadership skills can be learned (Cummings et al., 2008), these results present an important moral imperative to ensure that our healthcare organizations are led by individuals and teams who display relational
Conflict of interest
None declared.
Acknowledgements
Supported by a New Investigator Award, Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and a Population Health Investigator award, Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (AHFMR) to Dr. Greta Cummings.
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