The effect of managers' communicational behaviors on nurses' work engagement and psychological distress considering the mediating role of social support

It has been shown that the mental wellbeing of nurses could positively influence their work engagement and quality of care. Therefore, the present study want to examine the effect of managers’ computational behaviors, as an example of social support, on the nurses’ work engagement and psychological distress.

This study is a descriptive-correlational survey was conducted in 2017 based on the structural modeling. The study population was 72 nurses of intensive care unit in Afshar Hospital of Yazd, Iran. The data were collected using four standard questionnaires and analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics by SPSS16 and LISREL8.8.

The results showed that positive communicational behaviors of the supervisors and managers could significantly enhance the nurses' work engagement (P<0.05). Moreover, we found that the psychological distress of the nurses significantly decreased by positive communicational behaviors of their supervisors (P<0.05).

According to the results, the positive behaviors of the supervisors plays critical role in the mental wellbeing of nurses and could remarkably affect their work engagement and quality. Therefore, special attentions should be paid to the communicational behaviors of managers at work place.