Leadership and Management Roles in Nursing: Overlap and Strategies for Change

Describe The Difference In Roles Between Leadership And Management. Explain How The Goals Of Management And Leadership Overlap And Provide One Example. As a Nurse Leader, Describe How You Can Facilitate Change By Taking Advantage Of This Overlap.

Compare Two Leadership Theories. Provide An Overview Of Each And Discuss The Strengths And Weakness In Relation To Nursing Practice.

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.

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 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.

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.