Health‐promoting leadership: A qualitative study from experienced nurses’ perspective

Aims and objectivesTo increase knowledge about experienced nurses’ understanding of a health‐promoting work environment, health‐promoting leadership and its role in retention of staff in the nursing workplace.BackgroundThe quality of leadership is imperative in creating supportive and health‐promoting work environments to ensure workforce productivity and ethically sustainable caring cultures. More knowledge on how leaders can promote health and sustainable careers among nurses is needed. At a time of current and projected nursing shortage, it is important to understand the reasons why nurses intend to remain in their jobs.DesignQualitative descriptive.MethodTwelve experienced registered nurses participated in an individual, digitally recorded, semi‐structured interview. Data were transcribed verbatim and subjected to qualitative content analysis of manifest and latent content.ResultsA health‐promoting work environment should provide autonomy, participation in decision‐making, skills development and social support. Health‐promoting leaders should be attentive and take action.ConclusionHealth‐promoting work environments enable nurses to flourish. Having ample autonomy is therefore important to nurses so that when they face new challenges, they see them as a way of using and developing their competencies. Although most nurses claim their own leaders are not health promoting, they have a clear understanding of how a health‐promoting leader should act. The health‐promoting leader should not only be attentive and promote skills development, but also cater for nurses’ meaningfulness.Relevance to clinical practiceNurses in primary health care understand a health‐promoting work environment to be a workplace where they can develop, not only clinical skills, but also flourish as human beings. Further, nurses find it health promoting to have a meaningful job, using their competence to make a difference for patients and their families. Nurse Managers have an important role in facilitating meaningfulness in nurses’ jobs to retain nurses as a valuable asset for the organisation.