RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLES OF NURESE MANAGERS AND NURSES’ JOB SATISFACTION IN JIMMA UNIVERSITY SPECIALIZED HOSPITAL

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Leadership style of nurse managers plays a significant role in nurses’ job satisfaction.However, there is limited literature in areas related to nurses’ manager leadership style. The objective ofthis research was thus to investigate the relationship between leadership style of nurse managers andnurses’ job satisfaction in Jimma University Specialized Hospital.METHODS: The study was conducted at Jimma University Specialized Hospital from January to June2012 and used a non-experimental correlation design. All full time, non-supervisory nurses with anexperience of more than one year in nursing profession were participated in the study. The MultifactorLeadership Questionnaire and Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire were used to collect data. Datawere entered and analyzed using SPSS version16.0 statistical software. The results were analyzedthrough descriptive statistics followed by the application of inferential statistics on the variables.Significance level was considered when p<0.05.RESULTS: A total of 175 copies of the questionnaires were returned out of 186 copies distributed torespondents. The result indicated that nurses can prefer transformational leadership style overtransactional leadership style and had moderate-level intrinsic (M=2.72, SD=0.71) but low level ofextrinsic job satisfaction (M=1.83, SD=0.68). Furthermore, from transactional leadership, onlycontingent reward was found to be statically significant and correlated with extrinsic (B=0.45, p<0.01)and intrinsic job satisfaction (B=0.32, p<0.05) while all five dimension of transformational leadershipstyle were statistically significant and correlated with both intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction.CONCLUSION: Nurses tended to be more satisfied with the transformational leadership thantransactional leadership style. Therefore, nurses’ managers should use transformational leadership stylein order to increase nurses’ job satisfaction.