An evaluation of the relationship of nursing school administrators' leadership frame orientation to faculty perceptions of job satisfaction and leadership effectiveness

The purpose of this study was to determine which of Bolman and Deal’s (1997, 2003) identified four frames were favored and consistently utilized by nursing school administrators and whether multi-frame usage by administrators is associated with faculty members’ perceptions of job satisfaction and leadership effectiveness. Frame utilization and leadership effectiveness of nursing program administrators, as perceived by the administrators’ faculty members, was measured with Bolman and Deal’s Leadership Orientations Instrument (Other). The abridged Job Descriptive Index and companion abridged Job in General Scale were used to measure faculty satisfaction. The structural frame was identified as the most favored frame of the administrators, followed respectively by the human resource, the political, and the symbolic frames. The administrator-favored choices of the human resource and symbolic frames were associated with higher and similar mean leadership effectiveness ratings and also with higher mean satisfaction with supervisor scores. No statistical mean difference was shown for general job satisfaction between the various frame choices. Most nursing school administrators were identified as using none of the 4 frames consistently, while the second highest grouping of administrators was those classified as all 4frame users. The third highest group was the single-frame users, followed by the 3-frame users, and lastly, the dual frame users. Statistically significant relationships were found between the multi-frame index score of administrators and both general job satisfaction and satisfaction with the supervisor. Administrators with multi-framing capacity also had significantly higher means for leadership effectiveness than did the leaders with no-frame or single frame usage.