A study of staff nurses' perceptions of nursing leadership styles and work engagement levels in Saudi general hospitals

Leadership styles are meaningful in facing obstacles in healthcare, such as improving quality of care and performance of safety, minimizing expense, and keeping high-performing nursing staff; as a result, they can positively or negatively affect nursing work engagement, which has an impact on employee satisfaction, patient satisfaction, and organizational productivity. Thus the objective of this study is to determine the perception of the relationship between nurse managers' leadership styles and the levels of work engagement of the staff nurses in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This study used a quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional, and correlational design. A convenience sampling technique was used to select 383 staff nurses working in governmental hospitals in Saudi Arabia. The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale and the Multifactorial Leadership Questionnaire 5X short form were used to collect data. The study found that transformational leadership style (M±SD: 2.34±.946) and transactional leadership style (M±SD: 2.03±.686) had the highest mean scores from staff nurses' perceptions, while laissez-faire leadership style (M±SD: 1.4±.991) had the lowest mean score. Moreover, the highest mean score of staff nurses’ work engagement was dedication (M±SD: 4.80±1.380), and the lowest mean score for vigor (M±SD: 4.02±1.424). There was a strong statistically significant positive relationship between transformational and transactional leadership styles and staff nurses' levels of work engagement (r=0.591, r=0.517, P=0.000), respectively, while there was a negative but not statistically significant relationship between laissez-faire leadership style and staff nurses' levels of work engagement (r=-0.023 and p=0.64). Nurse managers who utilize transformational and transactional leadership approaches to empower and collaborate with staff nurses can improve organizational performance.