The impact of social exchanges on hospital workers’ engagement

Since collective action characterizes hospital healthcare delivery, quality social exchanges among hospital staff are important in order to generate employees’ positive psychological states, which in turn positively affect organizational performance.This paper contributes to the literature by applying the leader-member exchange (LMX) and the team-member exchange (TMX) framework to study the impact of social exchanges on work engagement in high-reliability organizations such as hospitals.Our investigation uses the hospital ward as the unit of analysis, and suggests that both LMX and TMX represent key factors in generating work engagement among the ward medical staff.