The Leadership Civility Framework: Advancing Leadership Theory to Cultivate Healthy Work Environments

To introduce the Leadership Civility Framework (LCF), an integrative model examining how leaders may cultivate healthy work environments (HWEs) through intentional leadership practices.

Nurse leaders must navigate increasing workplace complexity, workforce stress, and concerns about workplace culture while fostering civility, respect, and trust. While civility is recognized as essential to healthy organizations, an integrated framework explaining how leaders translate leadership civility into organizational influence has been lacking.

The LCF synthesizes civility scholarship with authentic, resonant, and transformational leadership theories and conceptualizes leadership as two complementary constructs: leadership civility (who the leader is) and civility leadership (what the leader does). Five interdependent leadership competency domains serve as the developmental and behavioral bridge through which leaders translate individual competencies into actions that may contribute to healthy work cultures.

The framework positions civility as a foundational nursing leadership competency that may contribute to psychological safety, trust, belonging, collaboration, accountability, and organizational effectiveness.

The LCF offers a theoretically grounded model for examining how nurse leaders may cultivate HWEs through intentional leadership practices and provides propositions for future empirical investigation of workforce and organizational outcomes.

The framework provides nurse leaders with a foundation for leadership development, organizational culture initiatives, and future research to strengthen HWEs and workforce sustainability.