The Impact of Transformational Leadership on Nurse Burnout: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The impact of transformational leadership is a methodological literature review on nurse burnout in the healthcare environment at the global level, i.e., in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area. Nurse burnout, which is potentially characterised as emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and the absence of personal accomplishment, can become one of the gravest foretellers of the risks to safety, manpower shortages, and poor healthcare. Peer-reviewed articles published in 2020-25 in PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were searched. The review of the evidence is what synthesises the results and suggests the correlation between transformational leadership and nurse burnout by including the mediating variables of job satisfaction, empowerment, and working environment and moderating variables of the healthcare setting, according to the PRISMA principles of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The results show the existence of a stable negative association between transformational leaders and three dimensions of burnout as measured by the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Transformational leaders can alleviate the effects of emotional exhaustion with inspirational motivation and identifying the employee personally and depersonalisation with professional development, encouragement and shared decision-making (Boamah, 2022; Montenegro Mendez et al., 2025). The writers of this association found that job satisfaction, structural power, and favorable working environments (Alruwaili, 2025; Al Sabei et al., 2023). The suggested solutions to prevent nurse burnout presented by the review are the investment in transformational leadership development programs, an empowerment-based management strategy, and the solving of structural workload problems. Future studies ought to use the longitudinal design to investigate the existence of cultural moderators in the GCC healthcare systems.