Actualizing Leaders to Inspire a Group Network (ALIGN): Feasibility and Pilot of Implementing a Commensality Group Program for Leaders in a Pediatric Healthcare Setting

Authors

• Thomas B. Ayres, Children's Mercy Kansas CityFollow
• Kristin Ray, Children's Mercy Kansas CityFollow
• Angela Myers, Children's Mercy Kansas CityFollow

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Background: Leadership behaviors in pediatric health care settings are strongly linked to leader burnout, professional fulfillment, and self-care in addition to influencing their teams. Despite their pivotal role, leaders often face substantial emotional burdens associated with their roles. Commensality groups, defined as small, recurring gatherings centered around shared meals and structured discussions, have emerged as a promising approach to enhancing connection, community, and resilience among health care professionals. A gap in the literature regarding commensality groups is understanding the mechanism of this well-being intervention. Our hypothesis is that commensality groups act as resource caravans and provide psychosocial resources to health care leaders to protect their well-being from stressors when their appraisal of the stressors is either negative as a hindrance or motivational as a challenge.

Intervention: Our commensality group program was designed as a pilot intervention for pediatric health care leaders. The program is aimed at fostering peer support, shared meaning-making, and emotional validation.

Method and Participants: Physician and nurse leaders from a pediatric health care organization were recruited to participate in the pilot commensality group study. Twenty-one participants (10 physicians and 11 nurses) were invited to attend a monthly commensality group for 6 months, and 5 additional physician leaders completed our surveys without attending any meetings. Each discussion was structured around at least 1 of 9 relevant leadership stressors. Data collection included a presurvey and 6 postmeeting surveys.

Measures and Main Outcomes: The primary well-being outcomes were operationally measured according to engagement, energy, professional fulfillment, work exhaustion, interpersonal disengagement, self-regulation, and social connection. Participants appraised the degree to which the most salient stressor in their lives was a challenge or a hindrance stressor.

Results: We observed significant differences between the experimental and control groups, with those in the experimental group scoring higher on energy, professional fulfillment, social connectedness, self-regulation, and challenge appraisals and lower on work exhaustion. We found one significant interaction where commensality group attendance reduced the positive association between hindrance appraisal and exhaustion.

Discussion: The pilot of our commensality group program demonstrated its feasibility and benefits for pediatric health care leaders. Commensality groups may provide psychosocial resources that mitigate the negative impact of stressors on well-being, even when the appraisal of those stressors remains the same. These findings contribute to the growing evidence that commensality groups represent an effective intervention that positively impacts well-being while offering insight into the mechanisms by which resource caravans and stressor appraisal interact in health care leadership contexts.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.52519/ACEQI.26.2.2.a3

Grants and Funding

I Love CM Fund/ Non-U.S. Gov’t

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Ayres TB, Ray K, Myers A. Actualizing Leaders to Inspire a Group Network (ALIGN): Feasibility and Pilot of Implementing a Commensality Group Program for Leaders in a Pediatric Healthcare Setting. Advances in Cancer Education and Quality Improvement. 2026; 2(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.52519/ACEQI.26.2.2.a3.