Western Sydney University: Leadership Styles and Patient Safety Essay

This essay delves into the critical relationship between leadership styles and patient safety within the nursing profession. It defines leadership and patient safety, emphasizing the role of effective leadership in providing safe and efficient patient care. The essay explores the influence of organizational culture and various leadership styles, including transactional, transformational, and democratic approaches. It examines how transactional leadership, focused on supervision and performance, and transformational leadership, which inspires innovation and change, impact patient safety. The importance of clinical leadership and the nurse's role in maintaining patient safety are highlighted. The discussion also covers the significance of open communication, transparency, and teamwork in fostering a culture of safety. The essay concludes by emphasizing the potential of combining different leadership styles to reduce clinical errors and improve patient outcomes, including a reference to the importance of reducing medication errors. The paper stresses the critical role of leadership in creating a safe and supportive healthcare environment. This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of how leadership impacts patient safety and enhances healthcare delivery.

Running head: NURSING LEADERSHIP
NURSING LEADERSHIP
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Effective leaderships are very important in the environment of the healthcare settings as it
contributes in providing safe and efficient care to the patients. The registered nurses play a vital
role in delivering the optimum care to the patients. So by taking the help of supportive guidance
and appropriate styles of leaderships the nurses can provide improved healthcare services,
improve the satisfaction of the workplace and promote the safety of the patient as well as
increase the outcomes of the patient. The culture of the organization is one of the key factors
which help in maintaining the safety of the patient as well as the safety of the organization. The
different kinds of leadership styles which can be implemented in any organization are
transactional, transformational, servant, democratic, autocratic, bureaucratic, laissez-faire and
charismatic leaderships (Sarto & Veronesi, 2016). The thesis statement is the use of proper
leadership styles can improve the safety of the patient. This assignment is going to discuss about
hoe the transactional and transformational leadership improves the safety of the patient and the
advantages of these two leadership styles.
A modest definition of leadership is the ability of inspiring individuals or groups of
people to act in an effective way to attaining a common goal. The leadership definition signifies
the essentiality of being capable in inspiring others and being prepared to do that. Effective
leadership is based upon ideas of whether the qualities are original or borrowed, but the quality
of leadership will not happen unless those ideas are connected to others in a method that engages
them enough to act as the leader wants them to act (Popescu & Predescu, 2016). An accurate and
appropriate style of leadership attribute all the necessary aspects which advances towards a
safety and healthy involved. The leadership can be define as the one of the key aspect leading to
the success or to the failure of the organization (Martin, 2015). The leaders should have the
ability to influence and motivate individual people as well as a group of people towards the

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vision or goal which been shared. The leaders express the goals of any organization by
remodeling the behaviors that they are expecting. Any risk associated with the safety of the
patient must be removed. For example, the cases of medication error, which is a common
incident and effects the safety of the patient. For evaluating any changes to reduce the incidences
of medication error, proper leadership styles have to be analyzed. The leaders may prepare
posters for safe medication administration, expecting others to follow the posters to avoid any
punishment but the nurses are not able to utilize this properly and so it can be said that the
transformational leadership will not be able to maintain the safety of the patient. The clinical
leaderships is very essential for running healthcare systems and particularly the nurses should
have the responsibilities in displaying the clinical leaderships. The leadership of the nurses are
not only dependent on the personalities of the nurses bur also are influenced by the situations
(Sarto & Veronesi, 2016). The significances of the leaderships in nursing are prioritized fur
meeting the demanding needs of the healthcare environment and also in preventing from any
hazardous clinical incidences. The nursing leadership can be defined as the interactive prices
which the nurses use in influencing the behavior of other staffs by motivating them to maintain
the quality of clinical care. The nursing leaders share their vision, set new directions, closely
monitoring the progress and providing assistance in sustaining and achieving the maximum
outcome of the patients. The nurses are critically adopt the leadership behavior in working
together with the multidisciplinary team and in providing effort in achieving satisfaction of the
patient improvement (Démeh & Rosengren, 2015). The connection that has been noticed
between the leadership and the safety of the patients, has emphasized the responsibilities and
roles of the leaders for encouraging the staffs to acknowledge the errors. It has also emphasized

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to have transparency in their practice and also in the implementation of the open communication
and by doing this, the patient safety can be improved.
The transactional leadership is that type of leadership which focusses on the supervision,
organization and the performance (Dartey-Baah, 2015). In this style the leaders promote the
compliance and by providing rewards and punishments the leaders become successful in keeping
the followers motivated towards them. This type is effective at the time of any emergency
conditions. The transactional leaders are also known to be “traditional managers”, who are
responsible for identifying the objectives, controlling the resources and monitoring the
performances of the staffs (Masa'deh, Obeidat & Tarhini, 2016). Apart from serving in the
emergency conditions, this leadership style is very beneficial for short term goals and also follow
the policy structures for maintaining the safety of the patient. However, because of the lack of
support from every individuals the result of this leadership style was unsatisfactory.
Transactional Leadership is that type of leadership where leaders motivate their employees to
bring the best out of themselves. Transactional Leadership, in comparison to others, is a
leadership style where leaders are dedicated on the task that has already been completed. Not
only the leaders prepare the criteria for their employees of how they should complete the task,
they also direct what sources and resources should be used. Leaders always advise their workers
beforehand what reward should be given for their performance. In the transformational
leaderships style the leaders inspire, encourage and motivate the employees to become more
innovative and create new changes which will help to grow and to shape the organization
(Njoroge, Gachunga & Kihoro, 2015). The transformational leadership style is completely
different from the transactional leadership. This style of leadership increase the morale of the
workers and it authorizes the staffs, pursue the continuity to bring the changes according to the

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prepared purposes. This leadership style opens the scopes and the challenges which will help in
the growth of the organization. This also creates a culture of trust and innovation within an
organization (Hussain et al., 2017). This type of leadership is not only inspirational, charismatic
and considerate but also this approach is collaborative and participative. This style is very
significant in improving the safety and health conditions of the patients. The leaders respect the
staffs of the organization and allow then to use the right of autonomy as well as motivating and
supporting them in achieving their goals (Vanebo, Bjørkelo & Aaserud, 2015). The
transformational style of leadership has proved to be the most helpful style for achieving the
contentment of work, safety of the patients and improving the culture of the organization.
Transformational leadership has happened when appointment in a group of people results in the
formation of leaders and followers arousing the other people to improved levels of enthusiasm
and ethics. It is not only enough to choice corrrctly, but the moral choice have to be attained. In
simple words, a transformational leader cannot be considered to be selfish rather he finds an
opening of growth among others. The transformational leadership improves intellectual
motivation through providing employee training and sexpansion. The transformational leaders do
the thing which transactional leaders do not, which is working outside self-motivation. The
importance of exceeding self-interests is somewhat lost sight of by the people who see that the
critical in maturity of development is self-actualization. The leaders have the duties in providing
the progress of the self-awareness, collaboration, autonomy and the teamwork of the staffs which
are associated in improving the patient’s outcomes and also the safety of the patient (Karagianni
& Jude , 2018). The safety of the patient should be maintained as it is an essential aspect of
healthcare delivery. The patient safety as, “avoidance or reduction to acceptable limits of actual
or potential harm from health care management or the environment in which health care is

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delivered”. Not only the nurses but also the doctors should maintain an effective communication
for reducing the risk of error or any kind of miscommunication to minimize any kind of harm to
the patient (Ebrahimi & Azmi Mohamad, 2015). The healthcare organizations have to transform
their behaviors and become much more proactive and constructive fir the purpose for achieving
the trust of the nurses and maintaining patient safety. The nurses who are very effective leaders
motivate the staffs for self-regulation, autonomy and collaborating the work for achieving the
common goal of safety of the patients.
Finally it can be concluded that all of the leadership styles which are discussed
(transactional, transformational and democratic) have different behaviors and attributes which if
used in a collaborate way can increase the outcome of the patient to a greater extent. If the
leadership styles are used the safety, quality and satisfaction of the patient will be impacted
greatly. The incidences of clinical errors involving the medication error and other errors need to
be reduced by implementing the accurate style of leadership or by implementing the combination
of all the leaderships to reduce the harm of the patients in future and increasing the safety of the
patient.

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