Leadership Role in Decreasing Nurse Turnover

Nursing shortages are reaching crisis level in the United States. Many of the nurses who fill these needs will be millennials. In order to address this crisis, nurse leaders must develop strategies to reduce turnover and retain nurses on their units. This research investigates how leader-member relationship affects turnover intention of millennial nurses. A nonexperimental correlational design was used to examine the relationship between nurse turnover intention and quality of relationships with leaders in millennial nurses. A 13-question survey including the 6-Item Turnover Intention Scale (TIS-6) and the Leader-Member Exchange 7-Questionnaire (LMX-7) were utilized to survey 20 millennial nurses through an online platform. The 95% confidence interval from this study revealed a negative correlation between leader-member relationship and turnover intention of millennial nurses. In other words, as leader-member scores increased, turnover intention scores decreased. If nurse managers want to retain millennial nurses they must learn how to improve relationships and create lasting partnerships with their team members. Nurse managers must partner with their team members to create a healthy working environment that fosters positive relationships, teamwork, communication, respect, safe care, collaboration, and quality patient outcomes