Head nurse's Leadership Styles and Leadership Outcomes

In contemporary organizations such as hospitals, leadership effectiveness and employee's satisfaction are two important leadership outcomes. Head nurses’ leadership styles and their performance play a key role to increase their effectiveness. Choosing an appropriate leadership style by head nurses, in addition to improving their performance, enhances nurses’ job satisfaction and results in organizational goal achievement. This study aimed to determine head nurses’ leadership style, as perceived by nurses, and its relationship with leadership outcomes in the educational-treatment centers of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, Hamadan, Iran.
In this descriptive-analytical research performed in 2015, the research population was all the nurses in educational-treatment centers of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences (n = 950). Using stratified proportional random sampling, 360 nurses were chosen as the research sample. The research instrument was Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), developed by Bass and Avolio.
The results demonstrated that head nurses applied a combination of three leadership styles: transformational, transactional, and laissez-fair. The result of multiple regression analysis showed that inspirational motivation, idealized influence, individual consideration and laissez-fair leadership accounted for 85% of the variance of leadership effectiveness. Individual consideration, idealized influence, management-by-exception active, management-by-exception passive and contingent reward accounted for 74% of variance of nurses’ job satisfaction.
The results of this study revealed that there was a significant statistical relationship between head nurses’ leadership styles and their leadership effectiveness and nurses’ job