The first and larger group, comprising 54.2 percent of the sample, was labeled the high thriving-vitality abundant profile. Nurses in this category scored well on both dimensions of the thriving construct: they reported a sense of aliveness and energy on the job, and they also reported a sense of learning and forward momentum, the feeling that their skills and knowledge were actively growing. The second group, 45.8 percent of participants, was labeled the moderate thriving-vitality deficient profile. These nurses maintained a moderate overall level of thriving, but their scores revealed a telling asymmetry: the learning component remained relatively intact while the vitality component had sagged. In plain terms, nearly half of the nurses surveyed were still growing professionally but had lost much of the felt sense of being alive at work. The authors argue that this internal imbalance is precisely the kind of signal that averaged scores conceal, and that identifying it is the first step toward targeted support.

Thriving at work, as the construct was formalized by Gretchen Spreitzer and colleagues in foundational measurement work published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, is defined as a joint psychological state composed of two experiential dimensions. The first, vitality, captures the embodied experience of energy while working, the opposite of the numb endurance that characterizes burnout. The second, learning, captures the perception that one is acquiring, applying, and refining knowledge and skills. The two dimensions are theorized to feed each other: energy fuels curiosity, and the satisfaction of mastering new challenges replenishes energy. The Shandong findings suggest that this reciprocal loop can be broken on one side. A nurse can keep learning, attending training sessions, absorbing new protocols, adapting to new technology, while the vitality side of the equation quietly collapses. That dissociation, visible only when researchers model profiles rather than averages, is the study’s central technical contribution.

To find out what determines which profile a nurse lands in, the team turned to two variables with very different reputations in the nursing literature. The first was career calling, the sense that one’s work is a meaningful vocation rather than merely a job, measured with a validated scale adapted for Chinese populations. The second was missed nursing care, a widely studied quality-of-care indicator that captures the tasks nurses recognize as necessary but fail to complete, whether due to time pressure, staffing shortfalls, resource limitations, or communication breakdowns. Missed care matters far beyond workforce psychology: earlier work by Beatrice Kalisch and colleagues linked patient-reported missed care to adverse events, and recent reviews have connected it to moral distress, fatigue, and turnover intention among nurses across multiple countries.

The statistical machinery of the study combined latent profile analysis, which assigns each participant a probability of belonging to each profile, with univariate comparisons and logistic regression to identify predictors of profile membership. Both candidate variables emerged as significant. Career calling carried an odds ratio of 1.195, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.139 to 1.255, meaning that each additional point on the calling scale increased the odds of belonging to the high thriving-vitality abundant profile rather than the moderate, vitality-deficient one. Missed nursing care moved in the opposite direction, with an odds ratio of 0.967 (95 percent CI: 0.946 to 0.988), so each additional point on the missed-care scale reduced the odds of membership in the high-thriving group. The confidence intervals in both cases exclude the null value of one, indicating associations unlikely to be products of sampling noise alone.

The direction of these effects fits a coherent theoretical story. A strong sense of calling, the authors suggest, supplies the motivational fuel that sustains both learning and vitality, aligning with self-determination perspectives on thriving articulated by Spreitzer and Porath, in which autonomy, competence, and relatedness act as nutriments for growth at work. Missed nursing care, by contrast, operates as a chronic stressor and a moral burden. A nurse who repeatedly watches necessary tasks go undone, not from negligence but from impossible conditions, experiences a corrosive gap between professional ideals and daily reality. Prior research by the same lead author had already identified missed nursing care as a mediator between career calling and turnover intention, and the new results extend that logic: the erosion of thriving may be one route through which uncompleted care tasks damage both nurses and, eventually, the patients they serve.

The practical implications, the authors argue, point toward nursing managers rather than toward individual nurses alone. Because nearly 46 percent of the sample sat in the moderate thriving-vitality deficient profile, the deficit group is not a small tail of the distribution but close to half the workforce. The study recommends that managers direct attention specifically to these nurses, whose moderate overall scores might otherwise let them slip under the radar of conventional wellbeing monitoring. Strategies aimed at strengthening career calling, through mentorship, mission-focused communication, and recognition of the social value of nursing, and strategies aimed at reducing missed nursing care, through staffing adjustments, workflow redesign, and resource allocation, are flagged as the two most promising levers. The authors are careful, however, to frame these as potential approaches: the cross-sectional design cannot establish that raising calling or cutting missed care would move a nurse between profiles, only that the variables are associated with membership.

That caveat matters, and the study is candid about its limits. Latent profile analysis on cross-sectional data identifies patterns at a single moment in time; it cannot say whether the vitality-deficient profile is a waystation on the road to full thriving, a stable equilibrium, or an early stage of disengagement that precedes burnout and resignation. Longitudinal designs tracking the same nurses across repeated waves, or intervention studies that deliberately manipulate calling-oriented support or missed-care rates, would be needed to confirm causal direction. The sample, drawn from a single Chinese province, also raises questions about generalizability to health systems with different staffing structures, professional hierarchies, and cultural framings of vocation. Still, the two-profile solution is a reminder that workforce wellbeing data often hide their most actionable structure beneath the averages.

For a profession under sustained global strain, with shortages, presenteeism, and turnover documented across continents, the study offers a reframing that is quietly radical. The question it poses to hospital leadership is not simply how stressed are the nurses, but which nurses are still learning while no longer feeling alive, and what in the environment is feeding or starving their energy. If the associations hold up under longitudinal scrutiny, the prescription is unusually concrete: cultivate the sense of vocation that draws people into nursing, and remove the systemic obstacles that force them to leave care undone. Thriving, on this evidence, is not a personality trait distributed by luck. It is a state that the workplace itself either sustains or slowly drains, one shift at a time.

Subject of Research: Latent profiles of thriving at work among nurses and their association with career calling and missed nursing care

Article Title: Latent profiles of thriving at work among nurses and factors associated with profile membership

Article References: Latent profiles of thriving at work among nurses and factors associated with profile membership. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10108-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10108-6

Keywords: thriving at work, nurses, latent profile analysis, career calling, missed nursing care, vitality, nursing management, occupational psychology, burnout, cross-sectional study, China, workforce wellbeing