Nurse Satisfaction at Work - Essay Example

"Nurse Satisfaction at Work" is a decent example of a paper on care.
The nursing profession requires nurses to remain focused, dedicated, and compassionate toward patient needs. An organization that does not maintain, as two potential examples, job security, and opportunities for personal challenge, can lead the nurse to experience feelings of dissatisfaction and internal emotional conflict. The nursing profession requires the professional to pay strict attention to issues of medicine delivery and accurate patient documentation, of which these issues can jeopardize patient health and well-being if dosing or document controls are not adhered to properly. Many hospitals experience liability when nurses are not performing accurately as it relates to patient needs. An unsatisfied nurse can be distracted, thus causing potential legal trouble for the hospital or clinic organization which is something neither the nurse nor the organization can afford.

According to research on the topic of dissatisfaction in the workplace, nurses are largely dissatisfied when they are not considered viable decision-makers and are not invited by administrative leadership to become a feedback mechanism for suggestions and systems formation. When nurses do not feel they are respected by the hierarchy of management, they will feel under-utilized and come to believe that they will not be able to achieve career development goals in the long-term. Nurses often maintain explicit knowledge of organizational systems and processes, therefore are usually quality resources for assisting in improving total hospital efficiency and policy.

Administrative leadership can interact more interpersonally with nurses in order to avoid ongoing dissatisfaction. Managers need to become transformational, meaning they carry inspirational values, set a mission for all organizational staff, utilize charismatic social principles, and also develop 360-degree feedback systems that include the insight of nursing staff members. Rather than being transactional managers, which is where they only reward or compliment when performance meets standards, the administration must be more proactive about developing quality relationships and organizational culture in order to fully satisfy unhappy nursing staff. Nurses should have a system in place that recognizes all of the efficiencies and competencies they illustrate during their workplace responsibilities so that they are not left with questions about whether they are being properly assessed for performance.

Because being utilized properly and recognized are highly important, the change model most relevant is the one provided by Kurt Lewin that identifies an unfreezing stage, a movement stage, and a refreezing stage for effective change. In unfreezing, the goal is to remove the unhealthy and unproductive systems and attitudes that had driven previous organizational policy and culture to establish a new vision or set of goals. Movement is getting nurses to adopt these principles and discover how new vision or policy would benefit their own well-being and job position. Refreezing is getting the new actions or goals to stick, by having management and leadership continuously reinforce these behaviors through role modeling or by consistently communicating the positive benefits of change and how this change has actually created better workplace conditions and cultural development. Lewin’s three-stage model of change provides opportunities to express transformational leadership style through relationship development and then reinforces these quality improvements through repetitive discussion, feedback, and outcome reinforcement for the change.