Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore the linkage between nurses' levels of optimism and performance outcomes.

The study sample consisted of 78 nurses in all areas of a large healthcare facility (hospital) in the Midwestern United States. The participants completed surveys to determine their current state of optimism. Supervisory performance appraisal data were gathered in order to measure performance outcomes. Spearman correlations and a one‐way ANOVA were used to analyze the data.

The results indicated a highly significant positive relationship between the nurses' measured state of optimism and their supervisors' ratings of their commitment to the mission of the hospital, a measure of contribution to increasing customer satisfaction, and an overall measure of work performance.

This was an exploratory study. Larger sample sizes and longitudinal data would be beneficial because it is probable that state optimism levels will vary and that it might be more accurate to measure state optimism at several points over time in order to better predict performance outcomes. Finally, the study design does not imply causation.

Suggestions for effectively developing and managing nurses' optimism to positively impact their performance are provided.

To date, there has been very little empirical evidence assessing the impact that positive psychological capacities such as optimism of key healthcare professionals may have on performance. This paper was designed to help begin to fill this void by examining the relationship between nurses' self‐reported optimism and their supervisors' evaluations of their performance.

The inherent violence of the patriarchal spectacle is at times decried through mass social movements such as the #MeToo or black lives matter movements in response to overt political displays of power or policies reinforcing inequalities of gender, race and ethnicity. While critical criminologists and feminists have spent decades on topics such as these, what is, more often than not, ignored is the banal patriarchal oppression women across the globe endure during their everyday lives. Moreover, women, most notably in the Global North and the United States in particular, assent to their oppression through the willingness of allowing the innate violence of an unequal patriarchal system of harm and violence. Our specific focus is on the routinisation of everyday life women participate in reinforcing the status quo of the patriarchal carceral state. We also suggest that social change must be more than reactions and demands for processes of change within the social structure that maintain the overall patriarchal state and structure of society: rather resistance must equal revulsion and rejection for a revolutionary social change to the innate violent system.