Nursing Leadership: Management, Leadership Theories and Practice

This assignment delves into the distinctions between nursing management and leadership, highlighting the roles and responsibilities of each. It emphasizes the importance of management for organizational success and the leader's role in patient care integration. The assignment further explores leadership theories, particularly transformational and adaptive leadership. Transformational leadership is presented as a method to facilitate change in nursing management, focusing on the leader's impact on followers. Adaptive leadership is also discussed, with an emphasis on the relationship between leaders and the environment. The assignment concludes by justifying the use of transformational leadership theory in nursing practice over adaptive leadership, considering the practical implications and the need for direct guidance in nursing scenarios. References supporting the concepts are also included.

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

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Answer 1
The most significant difference in between management and leadership is a leader has
a group of followers whereas managers have a people group under them who works for them.
For the success rate of any organization team, management is needed for a proper
organization and coordination of staffs. The roles of management are the creation of goals,
maintenance of the status, coping strategies from the best-managed organizations, controlling
risks, relying on proving and existing skills, building processes and systems. The main roles
of leadership in nursing are overseeing the patient care integration, inclusion of treatment
development plans, collection and evaluation of treatment results and management of medical
teams (Weiss, Tappen, & Grimley, 2019).
Managers and leaders have been found to overlap their functions. Leader and
managers have been found to perform different tasks and their functions have been found to
cross each other at several points. This is because of the fact that any managers cannot lead
and many nursing leaders cannot manage. Going through the roles of leadership and
management, the overlapped roles are the management of teams under the guidance of either
the leader or the manager. This is because of the fact that both the nursing leaders and
managers have been found to manage teams under their supervision for better patient care.
This overlap can be used in order to facilitate change in patient care (Chreim &
MacNaughton, 2016). Transformational leadership can be used to facilitate change in nursing
management. Other areas of overlap include optimism, integrity open communications and
decisiveness.
Answer 2
Leadership theories are defined as a series of thoughts which can be brought forward
in order to explain the reason for some individuals becoming leaders. Leadership has been

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found to refer to the ability of an individual to supervise and guide other individuals or teams
in order to move towards their goals and objective fulfilment. Transformational leadership
theory has been found to focus on the leaders in association with the followers (Fischer,
2016). Adaptive leadership theory has been found to focus on the relationship of leaders with
their contextual environment. The primary focus of transformational leadership that is
associated with the style of an individual which is inside the role of leadership.
Transformational leadership also helps in emotionally arousing the nurses by their leaders to
be effective in their daily work processes. However, Heifetz's adaptive leadership model has
been found to be focussed on the fact that the leadership process is not always governed by a
single person (Gonçalves, 2017). This theory states that the members of a process feel
empowered in order to act as the leaders of change. This is the main weakness of this theory,
the strengths being discussed before this sentence. During the nursing practice, situations do
not always arise where the group of the nurse can feel empowered by themselves without
having a leader to guide them or empower them. This is the main strength which
transformational leadership processes. Thus, it can be stated that it is justified to use
transformational leadership theory to nursing practice instead of adaptive leadership theory.

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References
Chreim, S., & MacNaughton, K. (2016). Distributed leadership in health care teams:
Constellation role distribution and leadership practices. Health care management
review, 41(3), 200-212.
Fischer, S. A. (2016). Transformational leadership in nursing: a concept analysis. Journal of
advanced nursing, 72(11), 2644-2653.
Gonçalves, M. (2017). Adaptive leadership in the promotion of youth mental
health. International Journal of Clinical Neurosciences and Mental Health, 4, 1-6.
Weiss, S. A., Tappen, R. M., & Grimley, K. (2019). Essentials of nursing leadership &
management. FA Davis.