THE RELATIONSHIP OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPE TO MANAGEMENT SKILLS IN HEAD NURSES: AN ISSUE IN SELECTION AND DEVELOPMENT.
Contributors: St. Louis University.
Published: 1984
Number of pages: 168
Subjects: Education, Educational Psychology.
Description: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between personality factors and the behavioral job dimensions required in the head nurse role. This relationship may help clarify the transition a nurse experiences when advancing from a staff position, which focuses on direct patient care, to a management position which emphasizes the ability to plan, organize, direct and coordinate the work of subordinates, in addition to interfacing with other hospital subsystems. The intent was to explore how an individual's psychological type might relate to the role conflict new nurse managers often reported and to gather information that might lead to selection and training procedures that would help head nurses synthesize these two roles.

The study sought to answer the following questions: (1) What will the distribution of personality types of existing head nurses be like and will it differ from a normed population of nurses? (2) How well will these head nurses perform on the head nurse Assessment Center Tasks? (3) What kind of relationship will there be between the personality types of head nurses and performance of behavioral objectives as measured by the Head Nurse Assessment Center Tasks?.

Eighteen full-time registered nurses functioning in the head nurse position at the designated health care facility volunteered to take part in the study. The subjects completed the Head Nurse Assessment Center Tasks as part of a management development program sponsored by the hospital and the Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator, a self-report inventory, for the purpose of assessing personality and performance of managerial job skills. The data were analyzed using a series of Chi-square goodness of fit tests, t-tests and a non-parametric procedure, the Mann-Whitney U.

The sample of head nurses was found to prefer an introverted rather than an extroverted orientation and demonstrated preferences for perceiving through sensing, making judgments based on thinking, and ordering their environment rather than adapting to it. When the sample population head nurses (N = 18) was compared to a normed population of registered nurses (N = 414), a significant difference was found between the study sample and the normed population on the MBTI index of Thinking versus Feeling. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-08, Section: A, page: 2454.

Thesis (PH.D.)--SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY, 1984.

School code: 0193.