Staff Nurse Perception of Leadership Styles Among Nurse Managers

This project examined if transformational nurse managers were perceived by their nursing staff as more effective leaders than transactional or passive/avoidant leaders using the Transformational Theory of Leadership through administration of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Form 5X) to nurse unit managers and staff nurses. 80 staff nurses and seven unit nurse managers participated in the study. Unit nurse managers completed the MLQ (Form 5X) about themselves and nursing staff completed the MLQ (Form 5X) about their unit nurse manager. Using descriptive statistics unit nurse manager results were compared with nursing staff results. The goal was for unit nurse managers to describe their perceived leadership style as compared to staff\u27s perceived leadership style of their unit nurse manager. Unit nurse managers\u27 Outcomes of Leadership were also determined with the assumption that the higher the scores, the more transformational the leader. Four unit nurse managers rated themselves as primarily transformational with transactional and passive/avoidant qualities and three unit managers rated themselves as having stronger passive/avoidant qualities than transformational or transactional leadership qualities. None of the unit nurse managers were rated by their staff as overwhelmingly one leadership style over the other. Unit nurse managers were rated as using all three leadership styles - transformational, transactional and passive/avoidant - equally with minor individual variances among the unit nurse managers. Therefore, it was not possible to reach an accurate conclusion to the project hypothesis