Guest editorial: Contemporary managerial issues in the nursing sector

Citation

Harms, P.D. and Lowman, G.H. (2022), "Guest editorial: Contemporary managerial issues in the nursing sector", Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 37 No. 3, pp. 189-191. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-04-2022-712

In early 2019, the World Health Organization declared 2020 to be the Year of the Nurse and Midwife (WHO, 2020) in accordance with Florence Nightingale's 200th birthday. With the emergence of the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic soon thereafter, the declaration of the need to recognize the importance of the healthcare sector, and nurses in particular, could not have been more appropriate or timely. Nurses are not only the largest occupation within the healthcare sector, but they often represent the first and only source of professional healthcare in many communities and are also the healthcare providers most likely to be exposed to dangerous and deadly infectious diseases. Despite the clear importance of nurses for a healthy community and economy, the nursing sector has been almost entirely ignored in the organizational behavior (OB) and human resource management (HRM) research literature (Harms, 2021) with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Hepburn and Enns, 2013; Koopman et al., 2019; Russo and Buonocore, 2012; Russo et al., 2015; Woolnough et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2019). That said, outside of the organizational sciences, there has been a burgeoning literature in the nursing sciences that utilizes constructs and concepts originally developed in OB and HRM, yet organizational scholars often overlook this literature.

The goal of this special issue was to highlight the importance of nursing as a critical profession, to provide a forum for work that demonstrates how organizational and nursing scholars might productively integrate their literature, and to shed light on new methods and ideas that might facilitate a better understanding of the nursing profession. To that end, we have brought together an eclectic mix of articles from a diverse group of scholars and featuring a variety of methods and topics, but which all serve to highlight the importance of nursing and how OB and HRM can be meaningful and productively applied to the nursing context.

Many of the articles in the special issue specifically deal with the variety of stresses faced by those in the nursing profession. For example, Landay et al. (2022) investigate the subject of burnout in nurses by focusing specifically on how harmonious and obsessive passion for their work might mitigate or exacerbate feelings of burnout. Interestingly, they found that both forms of passion showed evidence of providing protective factors against stress and burnout. Relatedly, Hochwarter et al. (2022) examine how the added stresses brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic may trigger compassion fatigue and even post-traumatic stress disorder in nurses. Two of the articles focused on issues surrounding the interpersonal hostility faced by nurses in the workplace. Andel et al. (2022) examine the role played by hostile attribution bias and by emotional labor as intermediary mechanisms for determining if incivility from coworkers and patients will cause decrements in safety behaviors. Xu et al. (2022) instead investigate workplace incivility as an antecedent of the nurses' own emotional well-being and utilize a daily-diary approach to document the key role played by sleep quality as a mediator between stressful workplace experiences and psychological outcomes.

The remaining three articles investigate phenomena outside of stressors and well-being. Leon (2022) investigates helping behaviors in the workplace and role of interpersonal relationships between nurses. Perhaps confirming our stereotype of nurses having a giving and heroic character, he finds that nurses will continue to help others even when such efforts are not always repaid in kind. Møller et al. (2022) look at another aspect of nursing, that of career opportunities and the willingness of nurses to travel long distances to fulfill their career goals. Finally, Lowman and Harms (2022) offer a broad overview of the state of the nursing profession from an OB and HRM perspective. Specifically, they address the ongoing workforce shortage in the field of nursing, made all the more acute by the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, they provide a brief overview of the state of the organizational literature concerning nursing and the ways in which OB and HRM scholars may meaningfully contribute to understanding this critical profession in the future.

We are extremely grateful to the head editors of the Journal of Managerial Psychology (JMP), Amanuel Tekleab and Carrie Bulger, and the publisher of JMP, Emerald, who have guided us throughout this process and helped in so many ways to bring this special issue to fruition. We are also so thankful for the many authors and reviewers who contributed to this effort and helped to make this special issue a success. And it goes without saying that we are thankful for those in the nursing profession itself. Your professionalism, your sacrifices and your willingness to put us before yourselves have not gone unnoticed, and we are forever in your debt. We hope that this special issue will serve as a small token of our appreciation for nurses worldwide, but will also serve as a foundation for future work by organizational scholars on nurses and the nursing profession.