Abstract

The aim of the present study was to investigate what kind of factors contributed to motivate a group of nurses at a nursing home in western Sweden to to perform their work. Furthermore, the authors wanted to investigate whether the staff nurses felt that the leader helped to increase or reduce the perceived motivation to perform such work, and the way in which staff nurses perceived their relationship to the leader. The study is based on Herzberg's (1959) two-factor theory, Hackman and Oldham's (1980) work designs theory and Leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, and those theories are the basis of the study's structure. The study was of a qualitative property, interviews were conducted with seven nurses and was structured, the questions concerned their subjective experience of motivating factors in their everyday work. The results of this study demonstrated that respondents experienced confirmation, the meaningfulness of the work, work colleagues, beneficiaries of care and residents' families as contributing factors to motivate them in their daily work. It was also found in the results of the study that respondents considered the leader as a factor reducing the motivation to carry out their daily work, as the respondents also felt the relationship with the leader to be very limited. The analysis also identified a new category that the authors have chosen to call "resistance".