Alternative work arrangements: Reshaping the future of nurses' workplace communication and relationships

This commentary advocates a research agenda for studying how alternative work arrangements (AWAs) affect nurse management and leadership.

AWAs mitigate burnout and the distributional imbalance of nurses. However, scholarship has shed limited light on how AWAs shape nurses' workplace communication and relationships.

Peer-reviewed nursing and management scholarship.

As healthcare systems in many countries move toward team-based care, communication becomes even more important for effective coordination and collaboration among healthcare team members.

Researchers should invest greater resources to understand the influence that AWAs have on different organizational settings as well as on the relational coordination among nurses and their managers.

Because care delivery and workplace relations depend heavily upon effective collaboration, researchers must update scholarship on AWAs to inform nurses and their managers on how they may strategically and effectively adapt their communication to evolving work environments that undergo frequent changes in nursing staff and teams.