Designing a Motivating Work Environment for RN’s

It is not a secret that health-care jobs are among the fastest growing and most needed in the nation. Amongst many health-care professions, nursing seems to be the sector of biggest need. We constantly need more nurses, and with increased quantity, we need superior management. With this field being so big and constantly growing it is easy for the nurse staff to be overlooked and be burned out quickly. Because of the high stress nature of staff nursing, motivation, support, and proactive work improvement policies are very important to retain qualified nurses. Hence, caring and motivating staff is a big part of successful leadership in an industry. Motivating nurses is one of the biggest challenges of nursing management that can be met by introducing interactive and proactive processes and avoiding reactive responses. Before, we start to discuss that; we will describe what motivation is in essence and what are need-based theories of motivation, which may be helpful for RN managers to develop appropriate motivating strategies.
Thus, what exactly is Motive and Motivation? By definition, a motive is an impulse that causes a person to act. Whereas, Motivation is an internal process that makes a person move toward a goal. Motivation, just like intelligence, cannot be directly observed. Alternatively, motivation can only be reasoned by noting a person’s behavior. Many researchers have developed theories such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which try to explain human motivation. Generally, all people have needs that they want to satisfy. Some can be classified as basic primary needs, such as those for food, sleep, and water. These needs deal with the physical aspects of behavior and are considered innate. These needs are biological in nature and relatively constant. Their influences on our behavior are usually notable