First line nurse managers’ roles and involvement in continuing professional development of nurses

Abstract

The roles of modern first line nurse managers (FLNMs) are greatly affected by the decentralization of healthcare systems, causing ambiguity in job delegation and increasing stress, disagreement and uncertainties. The roles of FLNMs have to be clear because their involvement in continuous professional development (CPD) of nurses is strongly correlated with them. Accordingly, this study intends to examine the FLNMs’ roles in terms of information processing (IP), interpersonal contact (IC), and decision making (DM) as factors affecting their involvement in nurses’ CPD. The concepts of the nurses’ CPD include lifelong learning, social proficiency improvement, career planning assessment, nursing care standard enhancement and quality improvement. The relationship between the FLNMs’ roles of Iranian Medical Science University Hospitals and nurses’ CPD was determined via the correlational quantitative study. Systematic literature review and experts’ validation were performed to modify and confirm the items of FLNMs roles in the nurses’ CPD. Three hundred eighty-four responses were analyzed through confirmatory factor analysis and a structural equation modeling. Generally, the measurement model confirmed that factors such as FLNMs involvement in the nurses’ CPD, IC, IP and DM are sufficient for the structural model construct with their correlations determined. DM has the strongest effect among FLNMs roles on the nurses’ CPD. FLNMs’ involvement in nurses’ CPD is affected by figurehead, leader, liaison, entrepreneur, disturbance handler and resource allocator roles while the roles of monitor, disseminator, spokesperson and negotiator are insignificant. There are significant differences in the confirmed FLNMs’ roles (except for monitor) and their involvement in the CPD of nurses, based on the FLNMs’ education and situational characteristics, and types of public hospitals. The results identified that the proposed model contributes to future design of relevant HRD assessment tool for a similar purpose.