Nursing is a diverse and sprawling career field that has unique opportunities and an array of challenges. Nursing is a combination of emotional and situational intelligence and technical skills and competencies. The transformational leadership theory could be a great fit for nursing because of the four factors of idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration. These four factors address the multifaceted profession of nursing.
Nursing as an act is focused on not only the treatment of disease and illness but the compassion and empathy given to patients in their most fragile and vulnerable moments. The act of nursing is an emotional toll felt by everyone to have done it. Nursing as a profession is a fast speed, technical, and demanding job that has serious implications and responsibilities. Nursing is also a unique profession in which the nurse has autonomous responsibility for 2-5 patients every shift while operating within the organizational standards and policies for that unit, hospital, and healthcare system.
Nurses have a high turnover rate, in which up to 37% of nurses will leave or change their job within their first year (Haddad & Toney-Butler, 2018). This high turnover rate could be due to a multitude of things, including a lack of leadership. Using transformational leadership could be the best leadership theory for motivating nurses. Transformational leadership is a leadership style that engages and connects with followers and motivates followers to reach their full potential (Northouse, 2016). Transformational leadership is focused on emotions, values, ethics, standards, and long term goals. For the 16th year in a row, nurses have been voted as the most honest and ethical profession, according to the 2017 Gallop Poll (Brenan, 2017).
Nursing as a profession is intrinsically about helping people, but as with every job burnout and lack of motivation happens to nurses. Factor 1 of transformational leadership talks to idealized influence, essentially a leader setting a high moral and ethical conduct standard (Northouse, 2016). This gives an image for the followers, nurses, to look up to and try to emulate. Factor 2 is the inspirational motivation that leaders can use to inspire followers to commit and feel a part of the bigger picture goals and shared vision of the organization (Northouse, 2016). The use of emotions as a motivator for nurses could be extremely effective because of the often emotional work involved with the job. Nurses see patients and families at emotional times and often have to know how and when to deal with such emotions. Using emotions to encourage action and inspire nurses may be a powerful tool for leaders. Factor 3 is the use of intellectual stimulation to challenge and engage followers (Northouse, 2016). This aspect of transformational leadership can influence the nurses to pursue continuing education, committee memberships at their place of work, or participation in conducting research. Finally and perhaps most importantly factor 4 focuses on individualized consideration. Using individualized consideration the leader creates a supportive environment that addresses and understands the individual needs and concerns of the followers. This is important in nursing because of the major differences in roles that nurses can have and obtain throughout their career. Nurses can work in the hospital where different floors specialize in different areas of health, require a different skill set, and have unique problems. Nurses can work outside of the hospital, in administration, informatics, education, and more. Being able to utilize individual consideration is very pertinent to the nursing profession.
References:
Brenan, Megan. Nurses Keep Healthy Lead as Most Honest, Ethical Profession, 26 Dec. 2017, news.gallup.com/poll/224639/nurses-keep-healthy-lead-honest-ethical- profession.aspx?g_source=CATEGORY_SOCIAL_POLICY_ISSUES&g_medium=topic &g_campaign=tiles. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
Haddad LM, Toney-Butler TJ. Nursing, Shortage. [Updated 2018 May 13]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2018 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493175/
Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.).Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Matthew Keith Creel says
Not only can transformational leadership be used in nursing as you explained, but it could also be applied to almost any profession or work setting. Using something I am familiar with as an example, consider a retail store. Most likely, retail store environments do not use transformational leadership, but perhaps they should.
Every retail store has a manager that oversees the entire operation. In transformational leadership, the retail manager should be the strong role model for the employees reporting to him or her (Northouse, 2016). The manager should be of strong moral and ethical character and earn the respect of subordinates. The manager should provide a vision and a path to success (Northouse, 2016). This would represent Factor 1 in transformational leadership, idealized influence. Based on at least one company that I will not name here, retail store managers are not always this type of leader. In fact, some have been known to be morally and ethically lacking which is unfortunate.
Factor 2, inspirational motivation, can be seen in a retail environment to a degree. Retail store managers often attempt to “rally the troops” to increase performance (Northouse, 2016), but again, not always. In an ideal implementation of transformational leadership, we would see the retail manager use encouraging words to motivate (Northouse, 2016). However, in my experience, I see threats and consistent nagging used in an attempt to “motivate” sellers to increase performance. Again, this is unfortunate and another way that transformational leadership would be useful in retail environments.
Intellectual stimulation, the 3rd factor, encourages followers to be creative and innovative, urging followers to come up with new ideas to solve old problems (Northouse, 2016). In the organization I am speaking of, this never happens. Sellers (followers) are told what do to, how to do it and when to do it. They are given a specific set of procedures to follow of which they are rarely allowed to deviate. It is almost like leadership wants to have a group of robots serving the guests that come into the stores. This is the third reason transformational leadership would be useful in retail.
The 4th factor, individualized consideration is rarely seen in a retail environment. This factor focuses on tending to the individual needs of each follower, ensuring they are developing and getting what they need in both work and home life (Northouse, 2016). What I have seen is that everyone is coached individually, but each individual coaching session is not tailored to the person. It is more of a “cookie-cutter” coaching style which is unfortunate because just like each leader is different, each follower is different and needs personalized attention. Transformational leadership would solve this problem in retail environments as well.
As you can see, even though it likely does not occur often in retail, transformational leadership can be applied to retail environments and likely most other work settings as well, including nursing.
References
Northouse, P.G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.