The relationships between organizational culture and thriving at work among nurses: The mediating role of affective commitment and work engagement

Aim Guided by the social embeddedness model of thriving at work, this paper explores how nursing organizational culture, work engagement and affective commitment affect nurses' thriving at work. Background Thriving at work has implications for better employee and organization outcomes. The antecedents of thriving at work among the nursing population needs to be expanded by analysing the cross-level impact of organizational and individual characteristics. Methods A cross-sectional design was used to collect data from 1437 frontline nurses in a tertiary teaching hospital in China between April and May 2020 through an online survey about perceived nursing culture, work engagement, affective commitment and thriving at work. Data were analysed using SPSS, and a structural equation model was established using the PROCESS macro. Results Our results showed that work engagement and affective commitment mediated the relationship between nurses' perceived nursing culture and their thriving at work. Among nurses, work engagement was positively correlated to affective commitment. Conclusion Our study confirmed the social embeddedness model of thriving at work by showing that both contextual and dispositional factors can influence nurses' thriving at work. Nurse leaders can foster nursing staff's thriving at work by building an inclusive work environment and by providing adequate resources to staff. Future research is needed to elaborate on employee and organizational outcomes associated with thriving at work. Impact Nurse leaders should be the advocate for nurses to improve their organizational identification, fostering their thriving at work. Individual nurses can also take an active role in developing work-related resources to sustain their thriving through self-adaption processes. Collective thriving in the nursing workforce is needed to overcome adversity and hardship in the ever-changing and increasingly demanding health care industry and to further contribute to the vitality of the broader social and public environments. Patient or public contribution No patient or public contribution. This study did not involve patients, service users, caregivers or members of the public.