Building A Model For High-Quality Nurse Leader-Follower Relationships From The Followers' Perspective

Date of Award

5-2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Leadership Studies, major in Organization Development

First Advisor

Ma. Assunta C. Cuyegkeng, PhD

Abstract

Issues in the health sector pose unique challenges to leaders of health organizations, especially on the nurses who make up majority of the workforce in this sector. In nursing, studies on leadership have primarily focused on the leader rather than the follower. While these studies have yielded very important contributions, a coherent understanding of the phenomenon may not be achieved without looking at followers and their relationship with the leader as influenced by the context of where leadership is experienced. By employing a parallel mixed methods design, this study sought to understand the factors affecting the quality of leader-follower relationships in the context of nurses from the perspective of the staff nurses. Thematic analysis was done on interviews with 11 staff nurses working in tertiary hospitals. Concurrently, data collected from an online survey of 317 staff nurses was analyzed using a structural equation modeling approach. The findings from the qualitative phase elucidated that the main factors that affect the quality of the relationship were characteristics of both the leader and the follower. These results were affirmed in the quantitative phase which showed that authentic leadership completely mediates the link between nursing practice environment and quality of leader-follower relationships among nurses. This study proposed a model for development of high-quality leader-follower relationships among nurses in the clinical setting.

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