Importance of Leadership Styles in Nursing-Samples for Students

Question: Discuss about the Different Leadership Styles are Important in Nursing. Answer: Introduction: Healthcare in the modern generation has become highly dynamic in form due to its constantly changing nature depending upon the demands or the needs of the patients. The increased need to serve patients suffering from chronic situations especially of the old people had created excessive pressure on the nursing professionals. Serving increased number of geriatric patient is not the only duty of the nurses. They also need to follow healthcare nursing guidelines in each activities starting from medication errors to safe patient handling, delegation, multidisciplinary team work. All these make the nursing profession quite challenging (Lin et al., 2015). Moreover, evidence based care ensuring best service quality is yet another expectation that every healthcare organisation expects their nursing professionals to follow. Therefore, nurses may tend to feel lost, confused, stressed out, loss of vision, confusion with their job role, lack of skill and knowledge and many others. In order to hel p them to overcome such situations, nursing leaders have to take up the responsibility of guiding the nurses in ways by which they can successfully practice their skills and provide high quality care. However, a particular nursing leadership style cannot be applied in every situation, as that might not help to overcome the issues entirely. The assignment will mainly provide a rationale of this remark and will help to establish the point with various examples and scenarios. Transformational leadership style is presently considered to be the best leadership style in nursing. This form of leadership helps in encouraging the nursing professionals to provide their best at work. Thereby, it motivates them to be the positive while practising their skills instead of being negative. The leaders mainly do this by helping them to align to a particular mission and vision and helping to develop engaged and productive teams. This form of leaders set themselves as an example whom the subordinates can visualise and thereby develop traits to be like the leaders and provide best quality care to patients. Motivation is one of their best weapon to make the employees learn new techniques, give their valuable feedback and hence achieve their mission and vision successfully. Such form of leadership has a number of disadvantages and cannot be applied in all situations. They are seen to be highly applicable in situations when change managements are required (Tyczowski et al., 2015). For example, a healthcare organisation is trying to implement technological changes in the organisation so that development of work procedures take place and different kinds of error like medication error, documentation error and others may reduce. Therefore, this form of leadership is helpful, as it would motivate the employees to come out of their comfort zone and develop their skills to match with the new requirements. Therefore, transformational leadership would motivate subordinates for stabilising with change management. However, such form of leadership cannot always be helpful especially in cases where crisis arises. In crises, leaders need to take urgent decisions and have to develop interventions by which the crisis period would be handled effectively. Transformational leadership cannot help in these situations as motivation to make subordinates align with the mission and visions, asking them for feedback, developing passion and similar others would not help to suppo rt the crisis. Crises need immediate change in management style of the leaders and therefore in such situations situational leadership should be preferred (Foronda et al., 2014). A scenario can be considered where a sudden natural disaster had taken place for example an earthquake. Therefore, there had been huge number of deaths and injuries that human beings have suffered in some number of communities. A sudden rush of huge number of patients would take place in the healthcare facilities where the number of patients would be much higher in comparison to that of the inflow of the number of patients in other days. In such a situation, nursing leaders have huge responsibilities to develop teams, allocate them tasks, send certain teams for community relief, keep some teams for healthcare options, divide the individuals according to their skills and others. In such situations, transformational leadership traits are not suitable for all the activities that need to be conducted in such si tuations. In this situation, situational leadership is very much important. This leadership style is flexible and helps in transforming different aspects of regular healthcare practices according to the existing working requirements and meeting different needs for clinical setting (Frankel et al., 2018). The situational leaderships are seen to modify their skills and management styles according to the situational requirement of the situation. This form of leadership style is very simple to imply, as it only requires the leaders to analyse the present situation of the organisation. This helps them to imply the best strategies so that the organisation can successfully handle the crisis. This style of leadership helps the nurse leaders to take decisions and thereby modify management styles as per the needs of the situation. They are often seen to divert from their own long-term goals and strategies that were previously set by the healthcare organisation. This is again another drawback of this style of leadership (Morsiani, Bagnasco Saaso, 2017). Another type of leadership that is also important in the nursing healthcare is the democratic style of leadership. This style of leadership is very different from transformational as well as situational leadership as it provides important to the feelings and emotions of the employees rather than being too passionate about work or trying to meet the needs of crisis respectively. This can be explained with the help of an example. In many situations, the junior nurses who have joined the organisation recently or who are under placements or are working in the multidisciplinary teams go through different types of emotions. They feel confused, scared, misinformed, lack of knowledge and skill, lack of enthusiasm, burned out and many others due to variety of reasons. An effective leadership is extremely important that would not focus on development of passion and motivation like transformational leadership or not help to take interventions for crisis. In such situation, democratic leadership is required. Such kind of leadership is seen to help the healthcare practices in the organisation by enhancing the participation of the junior employees in the decision-making procedure of the organisation thereby making them feel empowered (Grossman Valiga, 2016). However, the decision making power always resides in the hands of the leaders. Still, the leaders try to make them feel included in the organisation by collecting information about their likes and dislikes, feedbacks as well as ideas from the different nursing members before they finalise anything for the organisation. This kind of leadership is found to be very effective mainly in situations when nurses burn out or develop any form of conflicts among themselves, with their seniors or when the feel burdened with work or devalued in the organisation. The leadership styles make them feel valued and when the individuals feel that their feedbacks and suggestions are cared, the nursing professionals try to dedicate themselve s and give their best to the organisations. Researchers are of the opinion that input of the employees of the organisations is one of the most significant aspects that needs to be attended for not only the growth of the organisation but also to make the organisation a healthy competent place for providing the best care (Wong, 2015). However, there are also certain disadvantages that are associated with this leadership style. Getting feedback from all the employees and to provide enough time to make them feel included become difficult to be maintained a very busy healthcare ward. They tend to focus more on the development of harmony among the team members and helping them to feel included in the organisation allowing them to participate in different decision-making procedures. This form of leadership style may again tend to be a failure in many other situations like in periods of crisis or in times of change management and many others. Therefore, one solution can be suggested in a situation that would help to overcome the dilemma of the leadership style that a nursing leader should practice in any situations. Different individuals can adopt aesthetical leadership style that is not an antithetical to other forms of leadership. This form of leadership is mainly seen to be directed by the strong sense of ethics as well as morality. This leadership style allows individuals to adapt to any form of leadership by mainly being directed by the strong sense of ethics as well as morality. This form of leadership is mainly focused on the building of the positive work environment in the healthcare organisation. The ways that a nurse leaders; actions remain based on their moral compass and values are seen to influence those around them and thereby develop and enhance the working environment. The nursing leaders with aesthetic leadership has to practice component of the pattern of knowing in nursing that is associated with imitat ive learning style and the acquisition of the knowledge by successful accumulation of irrationalised experiences (Merril, 2015). Nursing leaders should be using their own experiences and can develop traits of different forms of leaderships to value empowerment, communication and considerations of the subordinates. Therefore depending upon different situations, leaders would develop the versatility of being dynamic in nature that increases job satisfaction, nurse safety performance, innovative behaviour, quality care and many others. Conclusion: From the above discussion, it becomes clear that different situations arise where different attributes of various leadership styles are required. Therefore, in order to be effective nursing leaders, individuals should have the versatility to be dynamic. They should be able to modify their styles regarding the requirements to tackle situations effectively. The leaders of the future generation have to be sure that they are aware of all the leadership traits of the different leadership styles. They have to be highly flexible in their approach so that with the various needs of the healthcare situations, the traits can be altered to meet the demands and necessities of the situation and lead the nursing professionals effectively References: Foronda, C., Budhathoki, C., Salani, D. (2014). Use of multiuser, high-fidelity virtual simulation to teach leadership styles to nursing students.Nurse educator,39(5), 209-211. Frankel, A., PGCMS, R. (2018). 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