Examining the Effects of Leadership Empowerment on Nurse Engagement and Organizational Loyalty
Posted: Feb 07, 2023
Abstract
The contemporary healthcare landscape presents unprecedented challenges for nursing professionals, including staffing shortages, increasing patient acuity, and administrative burdens. Within this complex environment, leadership empowerment has emerged as a potential strategy for enhancing nurse engagement and fostering organizational loyalty. However, the precise mechanisms through which empowerment influences these outcomes remain inadequately understood. Traditional approaches to studying leadership in healthcare have often treated empowerment as a unidimensional construct, failing to capture the nuanced ways in which different empowerment practices interact with the unique psychological and contextual factors present in nursing environments. This research addresses critical gaps in the existing literature by developing and testing a comprehensive theoretical framework that delineates the multidimensional nature of leadership empowerment and its differential effects on nurse engagement and organizational loyalty. Rather than conceptualizing empowerment as a monolithic intervention, we propose that it consists of distinct but interrelated dimensions: structural empowerment (access to resources and information), psychological empowerment (sense of meaning and competence), and relational empowerment (collaborative decision-making and support). Each dimension may operate through different psychological pathways to influence engagement and loyalty. Our investigation is guided by three primary research questions: First, how do specific dimensions of leadership empowerment differentially predict various facets of nurse engagement? Second, what is the mediating role of organizational loyalty in the relationship between empowerment and engagement? Third, are there threshold effects or nonlinear relationships that moderate the effectiveness of empowerment strategies?
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