The Significance of Stress Management Skills in Nursing Leadership

This essay delves into the critical importance of stress management for nurses, particularly in relation to career advancement and leadership roles. The author, drawing from personal experiences, highlights the pervasive nature of stress within the healthcare environment and its potential impact on both personal well-being and professional performance. The essay examines the significance of nurses' skills in managing stress, emphasizing its implications for leadership. It explores various methods for coping with stress, including self-efficacy development, positive thinking, and engaging in stress-relieving activities. The benefits of effective stress management skills are discussed in relation to career progression, with a focus on transitioning into leadership positions. The report concludes by emphasizing the need for healthcare leaders and managers to recognize and address the signs of stress among nurses, providing training and support to enhance their stress management capabilities, ultimately improving job satisfaction and motivation.

LEADERSHIP
Leadership
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

LEADERSHIP 1
Introduction:
Current health care environment has become very complex with increase patient demands
and high expectation of quality care. Due to various challenges during the care delivery pathway,
all nurses are expected to have relevant competencies for the management of complex issues in
hospital setting. This is vital to develop the trait required to become a good future leader. Current
nurses must have the confidence to overcome all adversities in the health system. With the
increase in health demands and need for services, stress is a common issue in daily practice and
nurses must learn to effectively handle stress too so that they can they overcome occupational
risk and avoid work-related stress to have an effect on their mental health (Dyess et al., 2016).
The main purpose of this paper is to look at the topic of managing stress, advancing your career.
The paper will discuss about the significance of nurse’s skill in stress management and the
implications of this skill in nursing and leadership role. The report will look into the beliefs and
experiences associated with the issue and analyze the negative and positive aspects of the ability
to manage stress in nursing. A comparison and contrast of the topic will be presented and the
paper will conclude with reflections on the connection of the topic with personal nursing issue
and the future nursing leadership/management role.
Personal story:
My personal experience of stress during nursing practice has motivated me to research
more on the topic of stress. The trauma that I had to go through because of excessive work stress
ultimately made me realize the need to take care of oneself for both professional and personal
well-being. During my first placement as a registered nurse in a hospital, I experienced extreme
stress because of several mistakes during my nursing activities and lack of proper support from

LEADERSHIP 2
my seniors. Even small mistakes made me anxious and inability to complete work on time and
several errors in between task reduced my motivation for work. However, with time, I realized
that stress and complexity will always remain in nursing practice. But what is important it to
learn the way to adequately cope with stress and never allow stress to affect personal and
professional work. I took help from my seniors and other experiences staffs in the hospital to
learn more about stress management and I feel that effectively dealing with stress is one of the
traits for effective nurse leaders too.
Significance of stress management in nursing
Work related stress among nursing staff is a serious issue and investigating about this
topic is crucial so that nurse leaders are able to understand the graveness of the situation and pay
attention to implementation of stress management program for nurses. Stress up to a certain point
is essential to drive performance as it is important to experiences challenges in life. However,
stress becomes harmful when it loses its beneficial effect and leads to negative effects in an
individual. In case of nurses, they often experience stress because of work demands, poor
interpersonal relationship, organizational factors and nature of nursing (Khamisa et al., 2016, pp.
538-545). Research papers has given several insight about the consequences of job stress and
these evidences further strengthen the need for increasing nurse’s skill in stress management.
Keykaleh et al. (2018, p. 2228) argues that nursing job stress is associated with increase in
absenteeism, intention to leave the job, reduced productivity and reduction in the quality of
patient care. Stress often leads to burnout in nurses and this has adverse consequences for patient
as they are deprived of adequate care leading to patient safety issues. The study by Sarafis et al.
(2016, p. 56) revealed how occupational stress affects the care behavior and quality of life of
nurses. By means of a co-relational study, the author revealed that conflict between interpersonal

LEADERSHIP 3
team is often a source of stress and this leads to uncertainty about treatment thus affecting care
behavior and patient safety. Hence, from this evidence, it is clear that more efforts are needed by
the management to reduce the stress level of nurses.
Methods of nursing management of stress:
In hospital setting, nurses are exposed to various forms of work related stress. This may
emerge due to diverse range of reasons such as role conflicts, lack of resource, increased patient
load, violent behavior of patients or families and interpersonal conflict. These work related
stressors increase feelings and perception among nurse that they are overworked and stressed
(Jordan, Khubchandani & Wiblishauser, 2016, pp. 2-7). However, it is essential for nurse leaders
to communicate with staffs regarding positively dealing with stress to enhance personal well-
being as well as advance one’s career. This is said because developing stress management skill
will help the nurse to take on complex responsibilities and seamlessly transition to the leadership
role. Nurse leaders can bring many changes in work condition and empower and motivate nurse
to decrease feelings of burnout and turnover rates (Mudallal, Othman & Al Hassan, 2017).
Jordan, Khubchandani and Wiblishauser (2016) gave evidence regarding unhealthy coping
methods for nurse. For example, nurses often turn to alcohol abuse or binge TV watching to
overcome stress. But this is a form of negative coping method that can be detrimental to mental
and physical health of nurse. A study gave examples of physical health impairment due to
chronic exposure to stress such as increase in high blood pressure, muscoskeletal injury, mood
disturbances and headaches (Robert & Grubb, 2014, pp. 62–69). Hence, the nursing leadership
role is important at this stage so that they support nurses to find healthy ways to cope with stress.

LEADERSHIP 4
There are various ways by which nurses can manage stress and play a role in taking care
of themselves. One of the strategies is that nurses must focus on developing their self-efficacy as
it will help them to effectively cope with stress. Self-efficacy is an attribute that helps individual
to well-organize their work and execute mature behaviors required to deal with ambiguous or
complex situation. The motivation of an individual to follow any specific behavior is dependent
on their perceived self-efficacy and this in turn influences their choice of activities (Jordan,
Khubchandani & Wiblishauser, 2016). Therefore, some support from mentors or nursing leaders
can enable nurses experiencing stress to adapt positive ways of coping. Another method of
coping with job stress is master the mind and the body by engaging in positive thinking, reducing
physiological symptoms and sharing emotions with others. Nurses can also engage in their
favorite activities to relieve stress and avoid the impact of stress on work (Rafati et al., 2017, pp.
6120–6128). Thus, nursing students should be trained for active coping strategies, eliminating
maladaptive coping and adapting positive techniques to overcome stress symptoms.
Benefits of nursing stress management skills on future leadership role:
With better skills in stress management, nurses will be able to advance their careers too.
This is said because by having better efficacy in dealing with stress, nurses will be able to
successfully adapt to their profession and achieve greater competency to take on the leadership
role too (Eslami Akbar et al., 2015, pp. 55–64). The primary goal of career advancement for a
nurse is to become future nurse leaders. To achieve this goal, developing the self-efficacy to
positively deal with stress is important so that they can easily transition to specialty roles
(Cziraki et al., 2018, pp. 47-61). Becoming a nursing leader or manager is the professional goal
of nurse and developing the competency in stress management can help nurse to become a
competent leader in the future too. This skills is required because stress exposure is even higher

LEADERSHIP 5
for a nurse manager and they efficacy in positively dealing with it can enable them to take on
more administrative role and manage complexities on the job. By this skill, they will be able to
motivate their followers too and develop a health workplace. Nursing leaders are often
vulnerable to risk of poor psychological well-being because of stress. However, by having the
competency to cope with stress in a healthy manner, the future nursing leaders will be able to
manage all the challenges in the profession (Labrague et al., 2016, pp. 1346-1359).
Conclusion:
The report evaluated the significance of stress management for nurse’s well-being and
advancing the career. The report demonstrated that the nature of nursing job is such that stress
will be a regular part of their work. However, it is important to support nursing staffs in
positively coping with stress to improve work performance and promote mental well-being. The
work gives implications to nurse leaders and managers in making efforts to identify signs of
stress in nurses and give them proper training so that they are negatively influenced by stress.
Instead their competency in stress management should be developed in such a way that job stress
never becomes a source of job dissatisfaction and low motivation for work among nurses.

LEADERSHIP 6
References:
Cziraki, K., Read, E., Spence Laschinger, H. K., & Wong, C. (2018). Nurses’ leadership self-
efficacy, motivation, and career aspirations. Leadership in Health Services, 31(1), 47-61.
Dyess, S. M., Sherman, R. O., Pratt, B. A., & Chiang-Hanisko, L. (2016). Growing nurse
leaders: Their perspectives on nursing leadership and today’s practice environment. OJ
Nurs.
Eslami Akbar, R., Elahi, N., Mohammadi, E., & Fallahi Khoshknab, M. (2015). What Strategies
Do the Nurses Apply to Cope With Job Stress?: A Qualitative Study. Global journal of
health science, 8(6), 55–64. doi:10.5539/gjhs.v8n6p55
Jordan, T. R., Khubchandani, J., & Wiblishauser, M. (2016). The impact of perceived stress and
coping adequacy on the health of nurses: A pilot investigation. Nursing research and
practice, 2016. doi.org/10.3390/ijerph120100652
Keykaleh, M. S., Safarpour, H., Yousefian, S., Faghisolouk, F., Mohammadi, E., & Ghomian, Z.
(2018). The Relationship between Nurse’s Job Stress and Patient Safety. Open access
Macedonian journal of medical sciences, 6(11), 2228.
Khamisa, N., Peltzer, K., Ilic, D., & Oldenburg, B. (2016). Work related stress, burnout, job
satisfaction and general health of nurses: A follow‐up study. International journal of
nursing practice, 22(6), 538-545. doi: 10.3889/oamjms.2018.351
Labrague, L. J., McEnroe‐Petitte, D. M., Leocadio, M. C., Van Bogaert, P., & Cummings, G. G.
(2018). Stress and ways of coping among nurse managers: An integrative review. Journal
of clinical nursing, 27(7-8), 1346-1359. doi.org/10.1111/jocn.14165

LEADERSHIP 7
Mudallal, R. H., Othman, W. M., & Al Hassan, N. F. (2017). Nurses' Burnout: The Influence of
Leader Empowering Behaviors, Work Conditions, and Demographic Traits. Inquiry : a
journal of medical care organization, provision and financing, 54, 46958017724944.
doi:10.1177/0046958017724944
Rafati, F., Nouhi, E., Sabzevari, S., & Dehghan-Nayeri, N. (2017). Coping strategies of nursing
students for dealing with stress in clinical setting: A qualitative study. Electronic
physician, 9(12), 6120–6128. doi:10.19082/6120 S
Roberts, R. K., & Grubb, P. L. (2014). The consequences of nursing stress and need for
integrated solutions. Rehabilitation nursing : the official journal of the Association of
Rehabilitation Nurses, 39(2), 62–69. doi:10.1002/rnj.97
Sarafis, P., Rousaki, E., Tsounis, A., Malliarou, M., Lahana, L., Bamidis, P., … Papastavrou, E.
(2016). The impact of occupational stress on nurses' caring behaviors and their health
related quality of life. BMC nursing, 15, 56. doi:10.1186/s12912-016-0178-y