The Association between Authentic Leadership and Work-Related Outcomes in Nursing : A descriptive literature review

Background: Authentic leadership, which emphasizes the sincerity, transparency, and ethical behavior of the leader, has generally played a significant role in the field of nursing, and it has had an important impact as a style of leadership to promote integrity, transparency, and trust among nurses. In order to effectively respond to the high-quality nursing needs of patients, scholars suggested that nurses should solve the problems in the nursing process through the implementation of authentic leadership in learning and practice. However, there is a lack of conclusive research on the effect of authentic leadership on nursing from the perspective of achieving good work-related outcomes in nursing. Therefore, it is significant to study the association between authentic leadership and nursing from the perspective of work-related outcomes in nursing.Aim: The literature review aims to describe the association between authentic leadership and work-related outcomes in nursing.Methods: This paper was a descriptive literature review. After searching and screening eligible articles in PubMed and Cinahl, 14 articles were finally adopted. These 14 articles were used for data analysis, and information addressing the research aim was summarized.Results: There was a significant positive correlation between authentic leadership and nursing work-related outcomes, and the results of all studies reached the level of statistical significance (p< 0.05). In terms of nurse outcomes, authentic leadership had the strongest effect on job performance (β =0.44-0.52) and psychological resilience (β = 0.38). Among organizational outcomes, the safety climate had the highest correlation with authentic leadership (r =0.49).Conclusions: The results suggested that authentic leadership was strongly associated with nursing work-related outcomes, it was an important part in the process of promoting good nursing work-related outcomes, which can be demonstrated by significant contributions to improving nurses’ mental health and professional behaviors, as well as promoting the quality of patient care and the safety climate of the healthcare organizations. These findings also provided powerful theoretical support for nursing managers to improve the quality of nursing and promote nurses’ career development.