Leadership styles and their impact on nurses’ motivation in teaching hospitals, Malaysia

In nursing, there are specific skills required from nurse managers to be able to lead the team. The skills include the ability to create an organizational culture that combines high-quality health care and patient/employee safety and highly developed collaborative and team-building skills. This study aims are to explore the leadership styles of and their impact on nurses’ motivation in Malaysia’s teaching hospitals, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Hospital and Universiti Sains Malaysia Hospital. A mixed of quantitative and qualitative methods, was performed in three phases. The first phase is a cross-sectional survey conducted among 93 nurse managers and 400 nurses, in second phase the intervention was done by delivering leadership skills modules to 93 nurse managers and the third phase is a qualitative study phase by interviewing selected nurse managers. The result of this study showed that the highest prevalence of leadership style used among nurse managers is authoritarian style with a prevalence of 74.2% (69). Overall, all the nurses’ working motivation related to leadership styles showed motivation scores between 69.5% and 71.98%. The lowest motivation scores were observed among nurses lead by manager who had positive features for authoritarian style. The result also indicated that the leadership skill training module does not affect nurses’ motivation scores. In the qualitative study phase, nine sub-themes were identified one of the sub-themes was interviews among nurse managers showed that most of them said “The best leadership style is not authoritarian but democratic style”. Generally, conclusion of this study show that the leadership style did not affect the working motivation of among nurses U29. Further comprehensive study on leadership styles is highly recommended so that the real issue is addressed