| The purpose of this study was to assess and explore the nursing leadership style of nurse managers working at the adult general care units in the National Guard hospitals in Saudi Arabia. Also it assessed the association of the leadership style with some selected organizational outcomes (staff willingness to exert extra effort, leaders' effectiveness, and staff satisfaction). This study is based on the transformational leadership theory developed by Bass (1985). This conceptual framework is considered as a full range of leadership, which incorporates transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership style. The design used for this study, was non-experimental, descriptive, comparative, and correlational design. A mixed method design of quantitative (Staff nurse and Nurse Manager MLQ survey) and qualitative (Nurse Manager Interview) data collection methods were used to achieve the purpose of this study.; The study was conducted in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, at the National Guard Health Affair hospitals in two different regions; Western region at Jeddah city and Central region of Saudi Arabia at Riyadh city. Total of 23 general adult care units were included in this study; fourteen units from Riyadh hospital and nine units from Jeddah. A total staff nurses response rate of 65.3% (N = 271) was achieved from both hospitals. In addition, 100% (N = 23) nurse managers of these units participated in the survey and interviews.; Data collected through the MLQ survey was analyzed using statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 12.0. The generated qualitative data was analyzed following Collaizzi's (1978) phenomenological analysis procedure after the data was sorted and organized using the NVivo 2.0 software.; The quantitative results of this study indicated that the nurse managers as well as the staff nurses working with them perceived that the leadership style of the nurse managers at the Saudi National Guard was a mix of both transformational, which means that nurse managers utilizing the five transformational factors, (nurse managers mean between 3.13--3.51, staff nurses mean between 2.00--2.41) and transactional Contingent Reward (nurse managers mean 3.18, staff nurses mean 2.21). Both nurse managers and staff nurses gave a higher rating to transformational factors than transactional factors. There were significant difference between the rating of nurse managers and the rating of the staff nurses. The staff nurses rated the nurse managers significantly lower in all nine leadership factors. The result also indicated that there was no significant difference between the demographic characteristics in regard to the perceived leadership style of the nurse managers (p > .05). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
