How do organizational culture and leadership style affect nurse presenteeism and productivity?: A cross sectional study of Hong Kong acute public hospitals

Presenteeism is defined as a type of work behavior in which employees are physically present at work when ill, often with reduced performance. While organizational culture and leadership style are known to impact the organizational behavior of hospital staff, as indicated by increased burnout and decreased work engagement, their impact on nurse presenteeism and productivity has not been explored. Moreover, nursing studies often neglect the importance of using multi-level analysis, adopting aggregated unit-level scores to account for collective perceptions to evaluate culture and leadership. This study aims to evaluate the impact of unit-level organizational culture and leadership style on individual-level nurse presenteeism and productivity in acute care hospitals using multilevel analysis. Cross-sectional study. Three major acute care public hospitals in Hong Kong, where public hospitals provide over 90 % of inpatient services. All full-time nurses (N = 4657) in the three study hospitals were invited to participate in this study. A total of 2339 nurses responded to the survey for a 65 % response rate. Organizational culture and leadership style are characterized using the competing values framework and a two-factor leadership style typology, respectively. Multilevel hierarchical linear modeling was applied with unit-level clustering in each hospital. Hierarchical culture was the dominant culture (M = 3.64, SD = 0.74) in our nurse sample. None of the unit-level organizational culture and leadership styles were associated with nurse presenteeism, however, rational organizational culture at the unit-level was significantly associated with increased productivity (regression coefficient: 0.17, 95 % CI: 0.04–0.31). This study provides hospital managers with improved understanding of the differential impact of unit-level organizational culture and leadership style on nurse presenteeism and productivity. Unit-level leadership style did not have a direct impact on nurse presenteeism and productivity in this study, while the externally focused rational organizational culture increased nurse productivity. Further research is needed to understand the impacts of modifiable work factors and nurse psychosocial emotions on presenteeism and productivity.