“Nursing administrators who want to promote staff-supportive culture in their facilities should recognize the key role of staff resources,” concludes a study in Journal of Gerontological Nursing, Vol. 34 No. 3. “Efforts to ensure adequate staff resources (in terms of number and mix of staff) might be most effective in facilitating staff-supportive organizational culture.”

“Predictors of Staff-Supportive Organizational Culture in Assisted Living“ (free to subscribers only) is based on a study of 294 staff members in 52 Maryland assisted living facilities.  Most of the workers were nursing assistants. The survey measured employees’ perceptions of teamwork, morale, information flow, involvement, supervision, and quality of meetings.

Staff in facilities licensed to provide higher levels of care rated their organizational culture as significantly more supportive than their peers in facilities providing lower levels of care - maybe because they are generally better staffed, hypothesizes author Elzbieta Sikorska-Simmons.

The second strongest predictor of staff-supportive organizational culture was a facility’s size, with smaller facilities ranked higher. Staff in small facilities were more demographically homogeneous and less structurally segregated (e.g., African-American employees were more likely to occupy professional positions), which leads to more cooperation and a more socially cohesive work environment.

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