Refinement and Validation of the Team Effectiveness Scale for Nursing Units

Purpose: Understanding that the complexity and dynamic nature of the nursing care setting creates diverse conditions for teamwork is important when developing tools to measure nursing unit team effectiveness. The Team Effectiveness Scale for Nursing Units (TES-NU), based on the Integrated Team Effectiveness Model, was developed without confirmatory factor analysis and only tested on one nursing organization. It needs further research to prove its validity and reliability. This study aims to refine and validate the TES-NU in various nursing organizations.

Methods: We designed this methodological study to refine the TES-NU by establishing its validity and reliability. The study included 330 clinical nurses from six general hospitals in South Korea, selected via convenience sampling. The TES-NU's refinement process includes item analysis, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, item analysis, and convergent validity.

Results: The KMO of 22 preliminary items was 0.89, the cumulative variance of the five factors was 67.58%, and the commonality was >0.40. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated the revised model fit well with better indices: CMIN/DF = 1.687, CFI = 0.936, TLI = 0.924, RMSEA = 0.059, and SRMR = 0.057. We simplified the refined scale to 22 items in 5 subdomains: "head nurses leadership", "job satisfaction", "cohesion", "work performance", and "nurses competence". Convergent validity (r = 0.69, p < 0.001) and reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.92) were validated for the revised TES-NU.

Conclusion: A refined TES-NU has tested their validity and reliability. Nursing managers can use this tool to manage the performance of individual nurses as well as nursing units, which will contribute to improving the work performance of the nursing organization.