Nurse Managers’ Leader Identity and Work Engagement: Crossover to Nurses’ Job Satisfaction

Theoretical background. The link between well-being at work and leadership relationships has received considerable attention in the literature. However, these two topics have become more crucial for healthcare workers, considering the pandemic. The study is an investigation of leadership and its effects on work well-being, that considers both parties in the relationship, i.e., leaders and followers, and a fundamental characteristic of leaders that impacts on how they enact leadership, i.e., leader identity. Drawing on the Crossover model (Westman, 2001), this study investigates whether leaders’ work-related positive attitudes (i.e., work engagement) cross over to followers’ positive attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction) through the latter’s perception of transformational leadership. In addition, the study analyzes whether leader identity acts as a personal resource (Job Demands-Resources theory; Bakker & Demerouti, 2017) for leaders increasing their work engagement. Methodology. The study has a multilevel cross-sectional design that involves nurse managers and their nurses in four Italian hospitals. Questionnaires were administered paper-and-pencil, and care was taken in matching nurses’ questionnaires with their nurse managers’ questionnaires to guarantee the formers’ anonymity and confidentiality of the data collected. First, using SPSS, we performed a multiple hierarchical regression with leader identity and other personal and job resources on work engagement in a sample of 156 nurse managers. We then tested a multilevel mediation using Mplus8, to investigate leaders’ work engagement crossover to followers’ job satisfaction using a sample of 1505 nurses divided into 156 teams. Results. 1) Leader identity acts as a personal resource for leaders by increasing nurse managers’ work engagement even after controlling for a number of other classical antecedents of work engagement (i.e., occupational self-efficacy, independence at work, role clarity; Bakker & Demerouti, 2017); 2) Nurse managers’ work engagement crosses over to nurses’ job satisfaction through transformational leadership. There is also a significant indirect effect from leaders’ leader identity to followers’ perception of transformational leadership via leaders’ work engagement. Conclusions. The analysis of crossover presented adds something new to the literature, since this is the first time to our knowledge that crossover from leaders’ work engagement to followers’ job satisfaction through transformational leadership has been tested. Future studies could add moderators or compare this model with a dyadic one analyzing pairs of nurse managers and nurses. Leaders’ leader identity is a significant antecedent for outcomes linked to leaders’ well-being and motivation at work. Leaders’ work engagement shows its powerful impact on followers, bearing out the importance of supporting leaders’ work motivation. This model offers a number of suggestions to improve leaders’ training that can “cross over” their benefits to the leader’s team. This study adds the important leadership construct of leader identity to the leaders’ and followers’ well-being process. In addition, even though positive crossover between leaders and followers had already been tested (see Gutermann et al., 2017), this model shows some meaningful differences in terms of the variables considered.