Nursing Workplace: A Case Study

Workplace learning is proven to influence employees’ job retention, job satisfaction, motivation to work, and performance (Ellström et al., 2008; Chappell and Hawke, 2008; Abdul Wahab and Selamat, 2011; Goldman et al., 2009; Filliettaz, 2013). Besides increasing employees’ skill, ability, and knowledge, workplace learning is closely associated with employee engagement thus enables the organization to shape better employees in the future. In today rough and competitive workplace, organizations are racing to provide effective workplace learning for their employees to stay updated.

As a way to achieve effective workplace learning, human resource (HR) roles are important in an organization (Welch and Welch, 2012). Professional development of employees

Indeed, Malaysian Nurses Board endorses a policy that registered nurses are required to be involved in a minimum number of hours of education and training each year since 2008 (Chong et al., 2011). The issue of nurses’ workplace learning is more alarming as majority of Malaysian hospitals is having shortage in the skillful nursing workforce (Barnett et al., 2010). A significant shortage of highly trained nurses in the healthcare workforce is not a new issue (Goodin, 2003; Buchan and Calman, 2004; Simoens et al., 2005; Barnett et al., 2010). This ‘crisis in nursing’ which was described as a critical shortage of professional nurses (Buchan and Calman, 2004; Simoens et al., 2005; Barnett et al., 2010) is creating fear, anxiety and loss of productivity in the healthcare sector. It is believed to largely affect the acute health care sector among many Asia-Pacific countries such as China, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia (Barnett et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2007; Liu, 2007; Preston, 2006; Singapore Nursing Board, 2006; Simoens et al., 2005; Buchan and Calman,

Therefore, instead of relying on the theoretical basis, the focus of this study is to investigate the HR roles of nursing line managers in nurses workplace learning. To sum up this section, the devolvement of the HR function to line manager phenomena has forced line manager to the edge. In addition, personality traits also been argued to play a role in executing better workplace learning. Therefore, a study regarding the HR roles of line managers and their personality traits is crucially needed to explore better implementation of workplace learning. The following section, therefore, will explain the three main issues in workplace learning, which are alleged as having connection to research questions and research