The Impact of Transformational Leadership Style on Nurses' turnover intention: Employer Branding, Job engagement and Organizational Commitment Mediating Role

Expert employees’ turnover such as experienced nurses in hospitals is a problem that disrupts the growth of hospitals and is a serious problem for managers seeking to hire, maintain and utilize human capital.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of transformational leadership style on turnover intention, with emphasis on the mediating role of job engagement, employer branding and organizational commitment of nurses.

The study population was nurses of public hospitals in Tehran. 332 of them were selected by random sampling and 287 correct questionnaires were analyzed. To collect data, standard questionnaires of transformation leadership style of Bass & Avilio (2000), job engagement of Schaufeli et al. (2002), organizational commitment of Allen & Meyer (1990), employer branding of Ambler & Barrow (1996) and turnover intention of Mobley et al. (1978) were used. Reliability and validity of the questionnaires were accepted through content validity, confirmatory factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha coefficient. For data analysis, structural equation modeling and Amos software were used.

The results of this study showed that transformational leadership has a negative significant effect on turnover intention of nurses through two ways; two variables at the individual level, i.e., job engagement and organizational commitment, and one variable at the organizational level, i.e., employer branding.

It is recommended that managers of Tehran's public hospitals provide conditions through adopting a proper leadership style in a way that engage the nurses to their jobs and reduce their turnover intention by promoting the employer branding and organizational commitment of the nurses.