Nursing Retention in the Post-Covid Era: Can Inclusive Leadership Slow the Hemorrhaging?

Abstract

This capstone project focuses on the nurse turnover challenges at AdventHealth Shawnee Mission (AHSM), a magnet hospital in Overland Park, Kansas. The challenges faced by AHSM reflect a larger national and global nursing shortage and attrition crisis in the healthcare industry that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated. Having recently conducted a system-wide internal evaluation of its adherence to the core principle of inclusion, the AHSM leadership was keen to garner a deeper understanding of how to retain its nurses through the lens of inclusive leadership, ultimately reducing its attrition numbers by advancing strategies that foster greater collaboration between front-line nurses and their managers in the decision-making process. This project examined the relationship between front-line nurses' "intent to stay" in their jobs and their perceptions of their manager's inclusive leadership practices. Additionally, the project examined nurse managers' perceptions of the organization's support for becoming inclusive leaders. The project utilized a cross-sectional survey to gather quantitative data using the Inclusive Leadership Questionnaire, a theory-based instrument that builds on the Inclusion Framework. A key finding of the study was that nurses that intended to stay in their jobs for five or more years gave their managers higher inclusive leadership ratings, on average, than their peers. Based on the project findings, recommendations included promoting more robust collaboration opportunities within and across work units, assessing the support provided to nurse managers, and incentivizing the adoption of inclusive leadership practices to improve nurse retention and address the nurse turnover challenge at AHSM.