Authentic Leadership and Its Relation to Structural Empowerment and Work Environment Among Nurses

Abstract

Background: Nursing work environments often expose nurses to toxic behaviors. Today’s nurse leaders face many challenges and concerns in order to empower their staff through creating professional practice environment that require a new type of leadership in which authentic leadership is considered a positive relational-leadership approach, a. Aim: To examine nurses’ perspective of authentic leadership and its relation to structural empowerment and work environment in critical care units at Shebin El-Kom teaching hospital. Subjects and Methods: Non-experimental descriptive correlational research design was employed in the conduction of this study. A simple random sample (244) of nurses having minimum one year of experience composed the study sample. Three standardized questionnaires were utilized which are Authentic Leadership Inventory, Conditions of Work Effectiveness Questionnaire and Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index. Results: The current study declared that the majority (98.4%) of nurses considered their leaders to be practicing moderate to high authentic leadership. Moreover, (95.1%) of nurses experienced moderate to high levels of structural empowerment. Likewise, about three quarters (75.4%) of nurses perceived high level of work environment. Conclusion and Recommendations: There was a significant positive relation among authentic leadership, structural empowerment and work environment from nurses' perspective. This study can help policy makers, administrators, and nursing leaders to detect areas in need of improvement in nurses’ work environment and handle it, which leads to improvement in quality of nursing care and consequently patient outcomes.