Exploring the Relationship Between Leadership Communication and Job Engagement Among Nursing Staff

Posted: Mar 04, 2023

• Phoebe Armstrong
• Desmond Pratt
• Kara Walsh

Abstract

The contemporary healthcare landscape presents unprecedented challenges for nursing professionals, with staffing shortages, increasing patient acuity, and administrative burdens contributing to concerning rates of burnout and disengagement. Within this context, leadership communication emerges as a critical factor influencing nursing staff wellbeing and performance. While substantial research has established the importance of leadership in healthcare settings, the specific mechanisms through which communication patterns affect job engagement remain inadequately understood. Traditional approaches to studying leadership communication have typically relied on self-report surveys and interviews, which while valuable, capture only a fraction of the complex communication dynamics in healthcare organizations. This study introduces a novel methodological framework that bridges computational linguistics with organizational psychology to examine leadership communication with unprecedented granularity. We move beyond conventional survey-based approaches by analyzing actual communication artifacts and patterns, employing techniques adapted from computational social science. Our research addresses a significant gap in the literature by investigating not merely what leaders communicate, but how they communicate, when they communicate, and the structural patterns that characterize effective leadership communication in nursing environments. The nursing profession presents a unique context for studying leadership communication due to its distinctive combination of high-stakes decision-making, emotional labor, and team-based care delivery. Nurses operate at the intersection of clinical expertise, patient advocacy, and administrative systems, making their engagement particularly sensitive to communication quality from organizational leadership.