BackgroundThe current challenges facing healthcare systems, in relation to the shortage of health professionals, necessitates mangers and leaders to learn from different leadership styles and staff empowerment strategies, so as to create a work environment that encourages nursing staff commitment to patients and their organization. This study intends to measure the effects of nurses’ overall perception of the leadership style of their managers, and psychological empowerment on their organizational commitment in acute care units, in National Guard Health Affairs, Riyadh City, Saudi Arabia.MethodsThis was a cross-sectional survey, where the data was obtained from nurses at King Abdulaziz Medical City. Hard copy questionnaires were distributed to 350 randomly selected nurses. Three hundred and thirty two (332) were completed, representing a response rate of 95 %. Three validated survey instruments were used to obtain the data: (1) The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), formulated by Bass and Avolio (1997), (2) The Psychological Empowerment Scale developed by Spreitzer (1995) and (3) The Three-Component Model of Employee Commitment developed by Meyer and Allen (1997). A theoretical model that conceptually links leadership, empowerment, and organizational commitment was used. The SPSS program version 19 was employed to perform descriptive and inferential statistics including correlation and stepwise multiple regression analysis.ResultsOverall most nurses perceived their immediate nursing managers as not displaying the ideal level of transformational leadership (TFL) behaviors. Nurses’ commitment appeared to be negatively correlated with TFL style and perceived psychological empowerment. However, commitment was positively correlated with the Transactional Leadership (TAL) style. Analysis, also, showed that commitment is significantly associated with the nurse’s nationality by region: North American (P = 0.001) and Arab (p = 0.027). The other important predictors of commitment include TAL (P = 0.027), Laissez-faire Leadership (LFL (P = 0.012), and autonomy (P = 0.016). The linear combination of these predictors explained 20 % of the variability of the nurses’ commitment.ConclusionThe study findings suggest that leadership styles and employee empowerment could play an instrumental role in promoting organizational commitment of nurses working in acute health care settings, at least in the Saudi Arabian context.

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The experimentally determined pressure drops due to a sudden contraction in two-phase flow in round pipes is given as a function of system pressure, flowing mixture quality, contraction area ratio, and mass velocity. The theoretical equation derived for the resulting pressure drop is ΔPc=G322gcρ¯[1−σ2+K¯TPC] where KTPC is a parameter independent of mass velocity. This parameter was evaluated for three different two-phase flow models. It is shown that the fog-flow (homogeneous) model gives the best correlation of data over the whole range of conditions studied. The range of pressures studied was 200–500 psia; the area ratios varied from 0.144 to 0.398; the mass velocity varied from 0.52 × 106 to 4.82 × 106 lb/hr-ft2. The fluid used in this study was water.

Although several studies have quantified costs of cancer care; none to date have examined how cancer costs impact family caregivers' emotional health. This study was designed to evaluate how perceptions of economic hardship influence burden, depressive symptoms, and anxiety in family

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