Prevalence of Transactional and Transformational Leadership Styles and its Association with Job Satisfaction in Nursing Staff of Tertiary Care Hospitals in Lahore

Background: Effective leadership plays a critical role in ensuring high-quality patient care and staff satisfaction. Transformational leadership is characterized by inspiring and motivating staff to exceed expectations through a shared vision, fostering innovation and professional growth. Transactional leadership focuses on structured tasks, rewards, and discipline, emphasizing a more direct exchange between leaders and subordinates. Objective: To assess the prevalence of leadership style in the nursing staffs of tertiary care hospitals of Lahore and the association of nursing staff's job satisfaction with the types of leadership styles. Methods: A comparative cross-sectional study using a modified form of the MLQ-5x questionnaire including a job satisfaction scale, distributed to the total 212 nursing staffs of Mayo, Jinnah and Lady Aitchison hospital. We analyze data by using frequencies and percentages and apply chi-square for assessing the association of leadership style with job satisfaction among nursing staff. Results: The responses from 212 respondents, revealed that the transactional style of leadership was the most prevalent (75.94%). Among the nurses, only 52.4% reported an adequate job satisfaction out of which 20.28% are in the transformational leadership category, 30.6% in the transactional category and 1.2% in a mixed category. 84.3% of the nurses in the transformational category are job satisfied while 40.4% of the nurses in the transactional category are job satisfied. Conclusions: The results reveal an alarmingly low levels of job satisfaction in the nursing setup. Of those with a transformative style of leadership imposed by their supervisors reported higher job satisfaction while vice versa was true for transactional style which was also the most prevalent style. Implementation of appropriate style of leadership by the authorities may result in better outcomes.