Nursing Leadership Impact in Healthcare

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Nursing Leadership Impact in
HealthCare
Strong leadership is an important aspect to successful healthcare administration. Leadership
provides direction that can be followed to achieve a health care objective. Leadership is defined
as the ability to influence people towards a specific goal. Leadership can also be defined as a
process that identifies a goal, motivates people, and support them to achieve the goal identified
(Giltinane, 2013). Strong leadership is integral in health care practice to delivering quality care,
safe and ethical practice. Leadership also enables development and maintenance of consonant
workplace cultures in health care. Health care practice does not exist in isolation and is
constantly affected by internal and external factors. Leaders in healthcare are required to create
health care delivery goals and manage teams towards achieving the goals. This entails that
nursing leaders have to make decisions and provide direction on activities and resources
involved in achieving a certain goal. Health care is also affected by social, technological,
economic, political, and legal factors that require leadership to address their impact when pursing
health care mission. The following essay will discuss importance of nursing leadership qualities
and workplace culture, staff turnover and job satisfaction as propagated by strong leadership.
The essay also discusses nursing leadership and it role in providing care quality.
Nursing leadership qualities are important for strong leadership in health care practice. Nursing
leadership qualities enhance the effectiveness of a nurse leader in meeting health care objective
(Giltinane, 2013). The first important nursing leadership quality is strong communication.
Leaders require effective communication skill to execute their role in health care practice.
Nursing leaders have a role of communicating the healthcare vision, mission, and goals in a
providing quality care to patients. They are required to clearly and continuously state the
direction that the team has to follow. Nursing leaders also need to interact with the practitioners
they lead in order to motivate them by inspiring actions (Curtis, de Vries, & Sheerin, 2011).
Effective communication is also important for nursing leaders as they act disseminate
information within the group and speak on behalf of the team (Casida, & Parker, 2011). The
second important nursing leadership quality is ability to delegate. Delegation refers to ability to
assign responsibility to others (Amagoh, 2009). Nursing leaders should be able to understand the

team members they are working with and trust them with responsibilities. Delegation requires a
nursing leader to understand individual team member in terms of strengths, specialties, and
weakness in order to assign tasks based on abilities and knowledge. Saint et al., (2010), found
that appropriate choices when delegating tasks improved overall quality of health care delivery
to patients and kept a practitioner happy by utilizing their strongest skills. Another important
nursing leadership quality is conflict resolution. Conflict resolution involves identification of a
problem or disagreement in the team an finding a peaceful and respectable solution (Hargis,
Watt, & Piotrowski, 2011). A nursing leader need to continuous seek to understand and observe
the team to avoid conflicts caused by personal, political, financial or emotion disagreements.
Nursing leaders are required to confront problems in a team before they can get out control.
Conflict resolution enables leaders to deal with tem conflicts and have constructive criticism
while maintaining respect than help develop a strong and effective working team (Cummings et
al., 2010). Lastly, mentorship qualities are equally important leadership quality for leading a
nursing team. Health care leaders should be able to motivate and empower individual and teams.
Mentorship offers inspiration to mastery or acquisition of skills. Leader need to be persuasive for
the team to follow in pursuing excellence in the workplace. Mentorship enable leader to achieve
their vision of providing quality health care by improving the skill of the team. Therefore, it is
important for nursing leaders to have leadership qualities that promote health care mission of
quality health care to patient.
Nursing leadership sets the workplace culture. Workplace cultures are beliefs and values in an
organization that influence staff attitudes and behavior. Nursing leaders change workplace
behavior when they want to accomplish an organization mission. Tsai, (2011) noted that
workplace cultures are correlated to leadership behavior. Leaders in healthcare have influence on
the workplace culture that nurses adopts when working. They positively influence workplace
culture by modeling behavior, establishing belief, setting expectations and reinforcing culture.
Nursing leaders model workplace behavior by leading by example. They follow what they put
forward and display expected habits in the workplace. Nurses follow what their leaders do and
view leader’s actions as standard to what is expected of them (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2012).
Nursing leadership establishes a purpose for nurses to believe in. Leaders establish role of nurses
in contributing to overall health care goal. They establish clear roles in a workplace failure to
which, nurses can fill the vacuum with their own purpose. Nursing leadership sets expectations