Impact of Soft Skills Training Program on First Line Nurse Managers’ Performance and Self-Efficacy: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Abstract Background : Soft skills for first line nurse mangers are the most important demands and requirements for their role to enable them to make their daily basis, to deal with the majority of health-care personnel. Soft skills for first line nurse mangers include the skills and characteristics that help them succeed in their roles such as communication, teamwork, and leadership. So, using those skills will reflect on performance of first line nurse mangers and their self-efficacy. Aim: To study the impact of soft skills training program on first line nurse managers’ performance and self-efficacy. Methods: A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design and utilizing a convenience sample of 70 staff nurses at Fakous Central Hospital. Five tools of data collection were used namely, Soft Skills Knowledge Questionnaire, The First Line Nurse Managers' Soft Skills Questionnaire, First Line Nurse Managers Soft Skills Observation Sheet, First Line Nurse Managers Performance Observation Form and General Self-Efficacy Scale. Results: Finding of the present study revealed a significant difference of first line nurse mangers' knowledge, perception and practice regarding soft skills as indicated by significant improvement in the mean scores of first line nurse mangers’ knowledge, perception and practice regarding soft skills(p< 0.001) that confirmed that there were highly positive statistically significant correlations among studied first line nurse mangers' total knowledge, perception ,practice regarding soft skills and their performance and self -efficacy. Conclusion: It was concluded that there was significant positive correlation was found between FLNMs’ total knowledge scores about soft skills and their total scores for perception, practice, performance, and self-efficacy across all phases of the training program. Recommendation: Applying soft skills as curriculum for the fourth year to prepare the students in the professional work in the future, further research needs to apply another soft skills such as problem solving and emotional intelligence.