The Implications of Trust on Nursing Team Contextual Performance: A Evidence from Malaysia

Abstract

Successful service-oriented organizations are made of proficient employees who are willing to give their best to achieve the organizations' objectives either as an individual or part of a team. The use of teams to accomplish tasks denotes that the members are more energetic, synergized, and active in collective surroundings. Nurses in particular, are highly dependent on teams because high-performing nursing teams will lead to a higher degree of members' satisfaction, decreased stress, increased quality of healthcare, reduced medical errors, and increased patient safety. Based on that notion, this study sought to examine the indirect relationship between team leaders' transformational leadership, team support and team contextual performance via the mediating role of team trust. Team contextual performance was conceptualized as the activities that affect the organization's social and psychological environment, such as teammates' helping behavior, acceptance towards suggestions or criticisms, and cooperation. A total of 1436 individual nurses (300 nursing teams) from seven healthcare institutions in Malaysia participated in this study. Data were collected using two sets of questionnaires which were distributed to the team leaders and team members respectively. Individual responses were combined and data were then merged and aggregated to the team level to get the team's final score. Analysis of the hypotheses were done using Partial Least Squares (PLS) and results indicated that team trust mediates the relationship between perceived team support and team contextual performance ($β$ = 0.175, p<0.01). The results from the mediation analysis also showed that team trust mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and team contextual performance ($β$ = 0.057, p<0.05. Discussion on the findings is provided.