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The importance of leadership style and psychosocial work environment to staff‐assessed quality of care: implications for home help services
Author(s) -
Westerberg Kristina,
Tafvelin Susanne
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
health and social care in the community
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.984
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1365-2524
pISSN - 0966-0410
DOI - 10.1111/hsc.12084
Subject(s) - psychosocial , work (physics) , quality (philosophy) , psychology , leadership style , style (visual arts) , nursing , work environment , applied psychology , job satisfaction , medicine , social psychology , psychotherapist , engineering , philosophy , epistemology , mechanical engineering , archaeology , history
Work in home help services is typically conducted by an assistant nurse or nursing aide in the home of an elderly person, and working conditions have been described as solitary with a high workload, little influence and lack of peer and leader support. Relations between leadership styles, psychosocial work environment and a number of positive and negative employee outcomes have been established in research, but the outcome in terms of quality of care has been addressed to a lesser extent. In the present study, we aimed to focus on working conditions in terms of leadership and the employee psychosocial work environment, and how these conditions are related to the quality of care. The hypothesis was that the relation between a transformational leadership style and quality of care is mediated through organisational and peer support, job control and workload. A cross‐sectional survey design was used and a total of 469 questionnaires were distributed ( M arch– A pril 2012) to assistant nurses in nine S wedish home help organisations, including six municipalities and one private organisation, representing both rural and urban areas (302 questionnaires were returned, yielding a 65% response rate). The results showed that our hypothesis was supported and, when indirect effects were also taken into consideration, there was no direct effect of leadership style on quality of care. The mediated model explained 51% of the variance in quality of care. These results indicate that leadership style is important not only to employee outcomes in home help services but is also indirectly related to quality of care as assessed by staff members.