Abstract
The study investigated two followership behaviors, followers’ active engagement and followers’ independent critical thinking, and their relationship with job satisfaction in a sample of nurses. In addition, the study also considered a number of control variables and classical job demands and job resources—workload and emotional dissonance for job demands, and meaningful work for job resources—which have an impact on well-being at work. A paper-and-pencil questionnaire was administered to 425 nurses in an Italian hospital, and a hierarchical multiple regression was used to test the hypotheses. In addition to the job demands and job resources considered, followers’ active engagement had a significant impact on job satisfaction. Moreover, it showed a significant linear and curvilinear relationship with the outcome variable. Followers’ independent critical thinking has a non significant relationship with job satisfaction, confirming the mixed results obtained in the past for this dimension. These findings bore out the importance of analyzing followers’ behaviors as potential resources that people can use on the job to increase their own well-being. Looking at followers not just as passive recipients but as active and proactive employees can also benefit the organization.
Highlights
The importance of followership, and its relevance for the organization, are clear to many authors who describe followership as a precondition for organizations’ success [1,2,3,4]
Followers’ behaviors and job satisfaction in nurses take initiative especially in the relationship with the leader, and followers’ independent critical thinking (F.ICT), that is the behavior of offering constructive criticism and thinking in an innovative way. We investigated these behaviors in the light of the job demands-resources model (JD-R model) [7], a framework which has already been applied to study the nursing profession (e.g., [8]) and which is widely used in investigations of well-being at work where it distinguishes the impacts of two different sources of well-being and motivation, resources and demands respectively [7]
We investigated the impact that a resource such as meaningful work (MW) and demands such as workload (WL) and emotional dissonance (ED) can have on Job satisfaction (JS)
Summary
The importance of followership, and its relevance for the organization, are clear to many authors who describe followership as a precondition for organizations’ success [1,2,3,4]. WL was always present in the initial papers on the model written by its designers [12, 13], and is described as a general type of demand consisting of having too much work to do and not enough time to do it [55] Even though it is a general job demand, a number of studies considering this variable for nurses found a Followers’ behaviors and job satisfaction in nurses negative relationship between WL and JS [56]. The two hypotheses which regard curvilinear relationships, and differ from the classical hypotheses in the JD-R model, are presented in a separate box
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