Early Career Nurses' Need Fulfillment Profiles: A Longitudinal Person-Centered Perspective on their Nature, Stability, Determinants and Consequences

In this study, we investigate the nature of Canadian early career (0 to 3 years) nurses’ ( N = 704; 87.8% female, aged 20 to 52) psychological need fulfillment profiles, accounting for the global and specific level of satisfaction and frustration of their needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Our adoption of a longitudinal design (12 months, three time points with n = 626 at Time 1, 459 at Time 2, and 370 at Time 3) made it possible to test the within-person and within-sample stability of these profiles. To obtain a more in depth understanding of these profiles, we investigated the role of job demands and resources in the prediction of profile membership, and several work-related outcomes of these profiles. Latent transition analysis revealed five profiles differing in global and specific need fulfillment levels. These profiles remained stable over the 12 months, although nurses tended to transition into less fulfilled profiles over time. Nurses’ perceptions of job demands and resources shared well-differentiated relations with the profiles, and more fulfilled profiles tended to report more adaptive functioning and well-being at work.