Nursing Leadership
Laura Edwards
Submitted to Jeanne Morrison PhD, MSN in partial fulfillment of
NR622 Advanced Leadership Concepts
Regis University
October 15, 2011

Nursing Leadership
Nursing leaders are crucial to any nursing organization. They motivate, empower, influence, and communicate the organization’s vision to create change within the organization. Great nursing leadership depends on great nursing leaders. This paper will define nursing leadership and describe leadership characteristics. It will further depict the democratic style and transformational theory of nursing leadership. While exploring leadership in action, this paper will illustrate the aspects of nursing.
Nursing Leadership Definition
“Leadership …show more content…

Strategic goals are vital for the organization’s growth and direction (Judge, 1999). Communicating the goals, allows for shared vision, which is the basis of a transformational style of leadership. Judge (1999) reveals how effective leadership is creative and has three creative fruits. The fruits describe leading team members with inspiration by a shared vision, understanding strategic goals, and trusting in the leader to lead. He further discusses leadership as serving a greater good.
Sharing the organizational vision initiates team collaboration. Team building follows when there is a vision, a mission, honesty, accountability, trust, and effective communication. To build a team, World Health Organization (2007) describes the five phases of a team’s development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and dissolving. Initial phase occurs through selection of team members. As the team members work together in expressing opinions in the group setting, the team moves on to solving problems while setting policy on handling conflicts. The next to last phase is to monitor results, and last phase transpires when moving on to other projects.
From building teams to handling conflict, effective collaboration allows an opportunity to sharpen verbal and listening skills. Townsley (n.d.) reviews anger can be constructive to problem solving but conversely, counterproductive to teamwork. Anger can be a catalyst for communication.