Different Leadership Styles are Important in Nursing

Running head: LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
DIFFERENT LEADERSHIP STYLES ARE IMPORTNAT IN NURSING
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LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
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 help 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

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LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
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 support 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