Nurses' authentic leadership and their perceptions of safety climate: differences across areas of work and hospitals

Purpose This study aims to compare nurses' authentic leadership and perceptions of the safety climate and concepts association according to different areas of work and types of hospitals. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional design was used to conduct this comparative study on 314 Jordanian nurses. The Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) and the Safety Climate Survey (SCS) were used. Findings Nurses in private hospitals were more educated. True leadership was mild. Unit nurses had higher ALQ and subscale mean scores. Armed forces hospitals had the highest ALQ subscales, while governmental hospitals had the lowest. The ALQ mean scores favored military hospitals. Governmental hospitals have a negative safety climate. Unit nurses had a higher SCS mean than ward nurses. Military, governmental and private hospitals are rated the safest. Nurses benefited from higher SCS scores in military hospitals. Nurses' ALQ and safety climate perceptions were moderately positive. Research limitations/implications A larger, randomized and equal-sized sample is recommended in future studies to conclude different areas of work and hospitals. It is also recommended to report the confidence interval in further studies using different statistical methods, increasing confidence when interpreting statistical significance variables. Other mediating, moderating and predicting variables could be studied and compared across different areas of work and types of hospitals. Sample characteristics should be handled as confounding variables in the next planned study using various ways to control confounding variables such as randomization, restriction, matching, regression and statistical control. The authors plan to statistically control for the confounding variables by entering them into the regression model. Future studies could investigate safety culture; both safety culture and safety climate are formative and inclusive terms (Experts Insight, 2017). Practical implications This paper fills in the gap in the literature and practice. Authentic leadership is associated with safety climate perceptions and varies across different areas of work and hospitals. Interventions are required to improve safety climate perceptions and promote authentic leadership in all settings and hospitals. Military hospitals ranked the highest in nurses' perceptions of authentic leadership and safety climate. Social implications The current study's favorable association between authentic leadership and safety climate measurement would apply to many high-risk institutions, including public and private hospitals. It becomes necessary to include the impacts of authentic leadership on the safe climate within the nursing curriculum and continuing education courses. This may be put into action by executing a hands-on activity, followed by information and reflection conversations that highlight the link between authentic leadership and safety climate measurement. According to the findings of this study, authentic leadership appears to be a basic block in making a difference in nurses' views of safety climate. Originality/value Authentic leadership style is a relatively new concept in the health-care sector, and its link to safety climate security still needs empirical evidence. It is still unclear how leadership resulted in more effective outcomes (Maziero et al., 2020). Few studies investigated both the concepts of authentic leadership and the nursing safety climate (Dirik and Intepeler, 2017; Lee et al., 2019a; Woo and Han, 2018). Aside from the scarcity of studies, no study has compared "working area," "department" or "hospital type" concepts. Few comparative studies have been conducted using concepts of interest. For example, authentic leadership was linked to empowerment and burnout (Laschinger et al., 2013) and nurses' satisfaction with safety climates (Vatani et al., 2021). No research has examined authentic leadership in Jordan's nursing and health-care context. Few studies focused on the safety climate other than authentic leadership (Abualrub et al., 2012) or the safety culture in Jordan rather than the safety climate (Khater et al., 2015).