Development of indicators of the transformational leadership behavior of head nurses in private hospitals in Thailand

Abstract

Indicators of the transformational leadership behavior of head nurses in private hospitals in Thailand are a necessary tool to aid in the development of nursing organizations in the highly competitive field of private hospitals, especially in the area of nursing services which require innovation in services to respond to the demands of patients and family members.

This study developed indicators for transformational leadership behavior of head nurses in private hospitals in Thailand by using quantitative methods.The development of transformational leadership behavior indicators are presented as follows:1) definition of operational terms; 2) creation of questions from the definition of terms, which resulted in 65 indicators of 4 components; 3) content validity testing by five experts, with a CVI = 0.95; 4) determining the internal consistency reliability with thirty head nurses of nurses in private hospitals in Thailand, with a Cronbach’s Alpha Coefficient for inspirational motivation, individualized consideration, idealized influence, and intellectual stimulation were 0.96, 0.96, 0.93, 0.93, Overall reliability was 0.98; 5) testing of the construct validity by using factor analysis to extract indicators , with 205 head nurses in large private hospitals in Thailand.The research instrument for measuring transformational leadership behavior contained four components with a total of 38 indicators: 1) intellectual stimulation is composed of 10 indicators, 2)  inspirational motivation is composed of 11 indicators, 3)  individualized consideration is composed of 11 indicators, and 4)  idealized influence is composed of 6 indicators.The developed instrument was congruent with empirical data (c ² = .452.53, CMIN/DF =.868, CFI =1.000, GFI= .900, AGFI = .858, RMR=.015, RMSEA= .000,6) Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for reliability after construct validity for intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, individualized consideration, and  idealized influence were 0.93, 0.92, 0.92, 0.87, and for overall reliability was 0.97.

The developed indicators can be used to measure the level of behavior of transformational leadership behavior of the head nurses and nursing administrators should use the information to develop transformational leadership behavior of the head nurses, especially inspirational motivation by making helping nursing team members see the future and talking about possible future images conditions.