Alexandra Nicolina Erling

Nurses doing the same job can experience it very differently. Some thrive, while others struggle and consider leaving. With that variation in mind, I attend to the meanings nurses attach to their work and how they carry those meanings into practice, offering one lens on nurse satisfaction and retention. Set in Swedish public hospitals, this thesis examines how work orientations surface in nurses’ interpretations of their work, and how those interpretations are enacted through job crafting. The findings identify three orientations: patient, integrated team-self, and self. Each orientation foregrounds what is taken as meaningful and what feels at stake, and tends to be expressed in distinct crafting patterns.
This thesis provides a qualitative, empirically grounded account of work orientations in nursing, offering orientations as a way to understand how similar conditions can be experienced and crafted differently. It also shows that job crafting is not only an aspirational act of enhancing meaning but a reactive effort to sustain it. Overall, the thesis suggests that efforts to support nurse satisfaction and retention can be enriched by complementing structural improvements with attention to the diverse meanings nurses hold and with the creation of conditions in which those meanings can be sustained.