Leadership Theories in Practice

Leadership Theories in Practice

Discussion 1

Evidence-based decision-making involves incorporating the best available evidence, practitioners’ expertise, and the community’s characteristics and needs. Administrative evidence based practices (A-EBPs) involve agency level activities and structures positively related with performance measures. There are five domains of implementation of A-EBPs namely leadership, development of workforce, financial processes, partnerships, and the climate and culture (Duggan, et al., 2015). The healthcare system generates unprecedented challenges such as system complexities, financial shortfalls, poor delivery of resources, clinicians’ shortages, errors and patient safety, and controversies in reforms. Nurse leaders can draw from clinical practice roots to partner with leaders in other health disciplines, policymakers, and community members to create solutions and alleviate the problems. This discussion examines two formal leadership theories and presents comparisons to observed behaviors to assess their effectiveness in the organization.

Effective nurse management is vital as it is one of the fundamental components that drive the teams’ performance, motivation, and job satisfaction. Leadership is defined as the discipline of offering guidance, direction, motivation, and inspiration of teams towards accomplishing mutual goals through management of resources, people, and information (Marshall & Broome, 2017). To elucidate information about leadership styles in nursing, it is prudent to consider the leadership theories prominent in nursing literature. AANAC recognizes the five main nursing leadership styles: transformational, laissez-faire, democratic, servant, and autocratic styles (Frandsen, 2013). Coaching leadership approach uses various leadership styles, and the main ones are (1) transformational leadership and (2) servant leadership, which form the basis of this discussion.

First, transformational leadership is defined as a leadership style whereby a leader ascertains the needed changes, creates the vision that will guide the changes through inspiration, and implements the change with commitment (Marshall & Broome, 2017). An example of the transformation leader in our CEO. For instance, during the COVID-19 crisis, rather than assigning tasks, he taught us how to think outside the box to devise nursing care plans for patients and generate positive health outcomes. By developing the creative nursing care plans, the team enhanced decision-making skills, improved self-esteem, and empowerment to realize our career aspirations. An important behavior portrayed by the CEO is embracing the “coaching….End of Preview….

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