Nurses’ Workplace Connections Shape How They Manage Impressions, Study Finds

Hospitals run on more than clinical skill. Behind every shift handover, physician round, and patient interaction, nurses are constantly managing the impressions they leave on colleagues, managers, and patients. A new cross-sectional study published in BMC Nursing suggests that the fuel for this subtle social choreography may be something researchers call social capital: the web of trust, reciprocity, and relationships that employees build inside their workplaces. Surveying 756 nurses across healthcare facilities in Türkiye, a research team led by Ali Erbaşı of Selçuk University found that nurses with richer social capital reported markedly greater use of impression management tactics, the deliberate behavioral strategies people deploy to shape how others perceive them.

The study, published on 03 September 2026 as an open-access research article, set out to fill a gap that has lingered in the organizational psychology of healthcare. Impression management is a well-established concept in workplace research, encompassing everything from self-promotion, where employees highlight their own competence, to defensive tactics, where they excuse mistakes or offer justifications to protect their standing. Yet the question of where nurses draw the relational resources that power these tactics had remained largely unexplored, particularly in terms of how the relationship might differ across demographic groups.

To probe the question, the researchers administered two self-report scales to their large sample of nurses and then applied a pair of sophisticated statistical techniques. Structural Equation Modeling, or SEM, allowed them to test whether social capital predicted impression management as a latent relationship rather than a simple correlation, accounting for measurement error across multiple indicators. Multi-Group Analysis, or MGA, then tested whether the strength of that relationship shifted across subgroups defined by gender, age, tenure, marital status, education level, income, and institution type. This two-stage approach is considerably more demanding than a basic survey analysis, and it is what gives the study its moderating findings their weight.

The headline numbers are striking in their symmetry. Nurses reported moderate levels of both social capital and impression management tactics, with mean scores of 3.344 and 3.307 respectively on the scales used, each with a standard deviation of roughly 0.58. When the model was fitted, social capital emerged as a positive and highly significant predictor of overall impression management use, with a standardized path coefficient of 0.433. It also predicted both major sub-dimensions independently: self-promotion tactics at 0.384 and defensive tactics at 0.411, all with p-values below 0.001. In practical terms, nurses who reported stronger workplace relationships were consistently more likely to report engaging in the full repertoire of impression management behaviors.

The moderation results are where the study becomes genuinely provocative. The association between social capital and impression management was stronger among male nurses than female nurses, and stronger among younger nurses than older ones. Tenure produced the most dramatic gradient of all. Among nurses with one to three years on the job, the relationship was at its peak, with a coefficient of 0.566 and the model explaining 32 percent of the variance in impression management. Among nurses with more than twelve years of tenure, the association essentially vanished, dropping to a non-significant 0.036 with an R-squared of just 0.001.

That tenure pattern invites an intriguing interpretation, though the cross-sectional design means causality and mechanism remain open questions. Early-career nurses operate in environments where reputations are still being formed, where every interaction carries stakes for probation reviews, team acceptance, and future references. For these nurses, social capital may function as raw material: the connections they build provide both the information and the audience that impression management requires. Veteran nurses, by contrast, may have already consolidated their professional standing, relying instead on established track records and institutional knowledge, so the relational pathway simply matters less to how they present themselves.

Just as telling are the variables that did not moderate the relationship. Marital status, education level, income, and institution type all failed to produce statistically significant differences in the strength of the association. This suggests that the social capital effect is not an artifact of a particular hospital category or pay bracket, but something more fundamental to how workplace relationships operate. The pattern held across the demographic and structural characteristics the team tested, with gender, age, and tenure standing out as the genuine fault lines.

The authors frame these findings as an extension of how the field understands nursing behavior. Traditional explanations for how nurses navigate their professional environments have emphasized altruism and adherence to clinical protocols, treating nurses as rule-followers driven by care ethics. This study proposes that interpersonal resources deserve a seat at that explanatory table. Social capital, in their account, may complement rather than replace those traditional drivers, offering a relational engine that helps explain why two equally competent nurses in the same ward can present themselves so differently to the people around them.

There are also practical implications for healthcare administrators. If workplace social capital is genuinely associated with constructive professional interactions, then investments in team cohesion, mentorship programs, and relational infrastructure may pay dividends beyond morale. The findings underscore the value of strengthening social capital as a means of fostering healthier workplace dynamics, particularly for newer nurses who appear most sensitive to its influence. A hospital that deliberately cultivates connection among its early-tenure staff may, in effect, be shaping the social behaviors that define its clinical culture.

The study’s limitations are worth keeping in view. As a cross-sectional survey relying on self-report scales, it captures a snapshot rather than a trajectory, and it cannot establish whether social capital causes impression management or whether skilled impression managers simply accumulate more social capital over time. The authors themselves call for future longitudinal research examining how relational resources shape impression management as careers unfold. Still, with 756 participants, rigorous modeling, and a clear moderating structure, the study offers one of the most detailed pictures to date of how the invisible social economy of a hospital ward actually operates, and it suggests that who nurses know may matter nearly as much as what they do.

Subject of Research: The relationship between social capital and impression management tactics among nurses

Article Title: The impact of social capital on impression management tactics among nurses: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Erbaşı, A., Diken, Ö. F., Oğuz, Y. A., & Altınışık, İ. (2026). The impact of social capital on impression management tactics among nurses: a cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05334-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05334-z

Keywords: social capital, impression management, nurses, healthcare, workplace psychology, structural equation modeling, multi-group analysis, Türkiye, organizational behavior, tenure, self-promotion, BMC Nursing