How to bridge the nurse innovation-diffusion gap? An in-depth case study of Create4Care.

Introduction: Nurses frequently innovate in response to operational failures, regulations, procedures, and/or other workflow barriers that prevent them from delivering high-quality patient care. Unfortunately, most nurse innovations do not diffuse to a broader audience, depriving other nurses from taking advantage of solutions that have already been developed elsewhere. This under-diffusion is problematic from a societal and welfare point of view. The goal of this paper is to understand how diffusion shortage of nurse innovations can be reduced. Methods: We develop a qualitative case study of a medical makerspace at the largest academic hospital in the Netherlands. This medical makerspace reported unusually high rates of nurse innovation diffusion. Our data collection includes on-site observations, archival data, secondary data, and fifteen in-depth interviews with key informants. Qualitative coding procedures and a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning are used to analyze the data. Results: Our data show that personal, organizational, regulatory, and market barriers prevent nurses from further developing and diffusion their innovations in an anticipatory manner. That is, because nurses expect that transforming an initial solution into an innovation that can be shared with others will be too time consuming and difficult they do not proceed with the further development. The medical makerspace that we investigated adequately addresses this problem by developing an innovation ecosystem that largely takes over the innovation and diffusion process. Discussion: We provide a concrete example of how a medical makerspace, and innovation support systems in a broader sense, can be designed to more adequately address the nurse innovation-diffusion gap. The two main elements of the practical solution that we identified are: (1) Support systems should facilitate that others may lead the development and diffusion of innovations and (2) The support system should promote that actors integrate their functional specializations within an innovation ecosystem. We make two theoretical contributions. First, we contribute to understanding barriers in the nurse innovation-diffusion process from a psychological point. Second, we identified that an ecosystem perspective is beneficial to develop innovation support systems in which diffusion occurs more often.

Facilitating health care workers' self-determination: The impact of a self-leadership intervention on work engagement, health, and performance.

The present study aims to test the impact of a self-leadership intervention on the work engagement, performance, and health of health care workers. By integrating self-determination theory and self-leadership theory, we propose that when employees are trained how they can autonomously influence own cognitions and behaviour, this will impact their work engagement, perceived performance, and general health. To test the hypotheses, a longitudinal field experiment with three measurement waves was conducted (pre-intervention, immediately after the intervention, and 2 months after the intervention). Health care professionals (n = 195) from five different organizations participated on voluntary basis and were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. Results show that a self-leadership training positively impacts work engagement and performance of health care workers. Furthermore, the improved work engagement also mediates the effects of the training on health and performance 2 months later. No direct effect was found on general health. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. PRACTITIONERS POINTS: The self-leadership intervention facilitates healthcare workers to develop self-determination and autonomous motivation, which will positively impact their work engagement, health, and performanceParticipation in the self-leadership intervention needs to be based on volition as this will contribute to the intrinsic motivation for actual self-leadership development through training.

Caught in the Middle: How and When Psychological Contract Breach by Subordinates Relates to Weekly Emotional Exhaustion of Supervisors.

In psychological contract research, the side of the supervisor is strongly underexposed. However, supervisors are responsible for maintaining relationships with both their subordinates and senior management and are likely to be influenced by events unfolding in these relationships. In this study, we state that supervisor well-being may be affected by subordinates who fail to meet their obligations. This study adds to psychological contract research by developing an understanding of how and when subordinate psychological contract breach (PCB) is associated with supervisor emotional exhaustion. Through a weekly diary survey among 56 Dutch supervisors, we test hypotheses about the relationships between subordinate PCB and the emotional exhaustion of the supervisor, the mediating role of perceptions of performance pressure by the supervisor in this relationship, and the moderating role of i-deals between the supervisor and senior management. Multilevel analyses support the first two hypotheses, but contradictory to our expectations show that the positive association between subordinate PCB and the emotional exhaustion of the supervisor is strengthened when the supervisor has high levels of i-deals with senior management. We discuss the findings in relation to their contribution to psychological contract theory.

Bridging Social Circles: Need for Cognition, Prejudicial Judgments, and Personal Social Network Characteristics.

Various factors pertaining to the social context (availability of plausible social contacts) as well as personality traits influence the emergence of social ties that ultimately compose one's personal social network. We build on a situational selection model to argue that personality traits influence the cognitive processing of social cues that in turn influences the preference for particular social ties. More specifically, we use a cross-lagged design to test a mediation model explaining the effects of need for cognition (NFC) on egocentric network characteristics. We used the data available in the LISS panel, in which a probabilistic sample of Dutch participants were asked to fill in surveys annually. We tested our model on data collected in three successive years and our results show that people scoring high in NFC tend to revolve in information-rich egocentric networks, characterized by high demographic diversity, high interpersonal dissimilarity, and high average education. The results also show that the effect of NFC on social network characteristics is mediated by non-prejudicial judgments.

[When do bad apples not spoil the barrel? Negative relationships in teams, team performance, and buffering mechanisms].

The study of negative relationships in teams has primarily focused on the impact of negative relationships on individual team member attitudes and performance in teams. The mechanisms and contingencies that can buffer against the damaging effects of negative relationships on team performance have received limited attention. Building on social interdependence theory and the multilevel model of team motivation, we examine in a sample of 73 work teams the team-level attributes that foster the promotive social interaction that can neutralize the adverse effect of negative relationships on team cohesion and, consequently, on team performance. The results indicate that high levels of team-member exchange as well as high task-interdependence attenuate how team cohesion and team performance suffer from negative relationships. Implications for research and practice are discussed.