The Effectiveness of an Intervention of Leader Empowering Behaviors to Reduce Staff Nurse Turnover Rate in Long-Term Care Settings

The overall purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the empowering behavior leadership program aimed at reducing staff nurse turnover rate and increasing staff nurses' quality of working life (including decreased job stress, and increased psychological empowerment, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and perceived organizational support) in long-term care settings. The empowering behavior leadership program is developed based on the theory of empowering behavior leadership, consisting eight sessions, each about 1.5 hour long, in 9-month period. Due to the result of this study, managers and administrators of long-term care settings would have a better understanding of how to reduce staff nurse turnover rate or prevent the situation getting worse. This study is a three-year project, divided into three phases: (1) the phase I is to develop two Chinese language versions of the leader empowering behaviors scale. One version is for nurse supervisors to assess themselves and the other is for staff nurses to assess their supervisor. A panel of experts will be recruited to review the content, format, readability, and usability of the instrument; (2) the phase II includes a pilot study with a group of 20 supervisors and 100 staff nurses in long-term care settings. The psychometric prosperities of the two Chinese versions of the leader empowering behaviors scale, the feasibility of the proposed 9-month intervention for supervisors in long-term care settings and the effectiveness of the intervention for reducing staff nurses’ turnover rate and increasing staff nurses' quality of working life will be investigated; (3) based on the results from the phase II, the phase III is to implement the modified intervention (with a large sample of 135 supervisors and 675 staff nurses in long-term care settings) using a longitudinal, quasi-experimental, pre-post test survey design with a control group. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the modified intervention on staff nurses in long-term care setting will be conducted.