| The current nursing shortage in the United States is only expected to grow over the next decade. The ability to educate nursing students has a direct impact on this shortage. A primary reason that schools of nursing have unfilled seats is a dearth of qualified nursing faculty. There is a gap between the traditional and ideological practices of nursing faculty and the business minded practices of nursing school administrators. The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental causal comparative study was to assess how transformational leadership behaviors predict nursing faculty satisfaction as compared with transactional and passive-avoidant leadership behaviors. The independent variables were perceived transformational, transactional, and passive-avoidant leadership and the dependent variable was nursing faculty satisfaction. Seventy-four participants who are members of a nursing educator listserv completed the survey. The Spector Job Satisfaction Survey was use to assess satisfaction and the MLQ-5x was used to assess perceived leadership styles. The single question demonstrated a strong correlation of 0.805 between transformational behaviors and nursing faculty satisfaction. Based on an alpha=0.05 significant level and p value of 0.00, there was a significant relationship between transformational leadership and nursing faculty satisfaction. Using this research, nursing school administrators can adopt transformational behaviors that could increase faculty satisfaction. This study contributes to the literature by expanding on the current understanding of faculty satisfaction related to leadership style with a focus on nursing faculty. |
