Nursing care facilities can be extremely stressful workplace environments. Burnout, disengagement, employee turnover, and a variety of other mental and physical health related issues are common challenges for nurses and other employees. In this educational session you will learn about creating social contexts that support psychological need satisfaction, which enhances everyone’s resilience when faced with stressful environments. Institutional leaders and managers play a key role in establishing these need-supportive social contexts; however, this session will remind us that everyone makes a difference.
Nurse Learner Outcome: After this session, participants will have greater knowledge and understanding related to both basic and applied research, which has demonstrated that conditions supporting people’s basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness foster the most volitional and high-quality forms of motivation and engagement for activities, including enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity. On the other hand, when these psychological needs are not supported or perhaps thwarted within a social context, psychological and physical wellness suffer. Domains of research include nearly all aspects of human socio-cultural institutions (family, education, justice system, government, religion, etc…) with one of the largest applications being in healthcare contexts.
Learner Objectives:
- Learners will be able to list and define the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
- For each of the three psychological needs, learners will be able to describe at least one aspect of their workplace context that they could influence to increase the need supportiveness of that environment.
- Learners will be able to describe how one’s perception of the social context ultimately determines how need-supportive it is for them.
- Learners will be able to describe, in general terms, at least one scientific study of psychological needs in nursing contexts well enough to explain how the findings of the research might be applied to their workplace setting.