Where Two Worlds Collide: Exploring the Role of Team Leaders in Supporting Nurse Well-Being

To enhance well-being of nurses, team leaders have increasingly been given the responsibility for supporting nurses. However, prior research has shown that team leaders experience difficulty supporting nurses due to congruent demands from management and staff. In this paper, we explore how team leaders support nurse well-being while dealing with these conflicting demands. To this aim we conducted an exploratory multiple case study, whereby the sample consists of 49 staff members (23 frontline managers and 26 of their nurses) from different departments (including acute care, nursing wards and outpatient clinic) in three Dutch hospitals (academic, teaching, general). Our results show that team leaders mainly support nurses through people work, specifically by shaping individual work and health and engaging in behavior to make nurses feel valued. Faced with competing demands, they try to reinforce efforts to enhance nurse well-being through reconciling change and continuity. Our results further show that a lack of managerial involvement seems to hamper the support efforts of team leaders. We contribute to organizational support literature, by providing empirical insight into the role of team leaders in making employees feel that their contributions are being valued and their well-being is being supported.