Authentic leadership and thriving among nurses: the mediating role of empathy

Thriving at work is defined as a psychological state in which employees experience both a sense of vitality and a sense of learning at work (Porath, Spreitzer, Gibson, & Garnett, 2012) and is an important indicator of employees’ well-being (Shirom, Toker, Berliner, Shapira, & Melamed, 2008). Previous research has shown that thriving is related to positive work outcomes such as innovative work behavior (Carmeli & Spreitzer, 2009). So far, thriving has not been studied in health care workers, and little is known about its antecedents or psychological mechanisms which may foster the development of thriving. Given these research voids and as nurses’ well-being at work (Shirom, et al., 2008), their competences (e.g. Cowan, Wilson-Barnett, Norman, & Murrelss, 2008) and the quality of leadership (Cummings et al., 2010) are key assets for health care organizations, we hypothesize in the current study that thriving in nurses is positively associated to authentic leadership of the headnurse. Moreover we expect that this relation will be mediated by nurses’ empathy. Cross sectional data were collected in a Flemish hospital nurse sample (N = 360) by means of a self-report questionnaire, including some validated scales. Data were analyzed by hierarchical linear regression, the multi-step procedure of Baron and Kenny (1986), bootstrapping and a Sobel-test. We took account of some control variables. General results showed a partial mediation of empathy on the positive relation between authentic leadership and thriving. More specifically, we found that nurses’ empathy fully mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and their level of vitality at work. In contrast, empathy did not mediate the relationship between authentic leadership and learning. Explanations and implications of these results and research limitations will be discussed at the time of the conference