Abstract: Objective: To analyze the latent categories and characteristics of clinical nurses' innovative behaviors and explore the influencing factors of these categories, thereby providing a basis for nursing managers to take interventions to stimulate nurses' innovative behaviors. Methods: Using a convenience sampling method, 1050 nurses from five tertiary general hospitals in Jining city were selected as survey participants from November to December 2023. A questionnaire survey was conducted using General Information Survey, Nurse Innovative Behavior Scale, Paradoxical Leader Behavior Scale, and Psychological Empowerment Scale. Then latent profile analysis was adopted to determine the potential categories of nurses' innovative behaviors, and univariate analysis and Logistic regression analysis were used to identify the influencing factors of the latent categories. Results: The score for nurses' innovative behaviors was 33.12±6.62. Nurses' innovative behaviors could be divided into three latent profiles: high creativity-positive (28.86%), low support-negative (16.38%), and moderate level (54.76%). Logistic regression analysis and model fitting results consistently showed that age, job title, psychological empowerment, and paradoxical leadership were influencing factors of the latent classes of nurses' innovative behaviors. Conclusion: Though individual heterogeneity exists when analyzing nurses' innovative behaviors, nursing managers can classify nurses based on the influencing factors of different latent classes of innovative behaviors to implement targeted interventions to improve their innovative behaviors.

Key words: innovative behavior; latent profile analysis; paradoxical leadership; psychological empowerment