Leadership Roles and Management Functions in Nursing, Article Critique Example

In the provided example, I would have to decide whether I was truly unprepared to work in obstetrics or just uncomfortable working in an unfamiliar environment. Carol’s decision to request my help in the department shows a great deal of trust and the validation of my own skills as a nurse. The assignment gives no indication that Carol is at all incompetent in her position as supervisor; thus, her insistence that I should “do the best you can” demonstrates her faith in my abilities as she would not put an incompetent or untrained nurse in the stressful and busy delivery room. However, by accommodating Carol’s wishes, I would be putting myself, the hospital, and patients at risk should I encounter a situation that was well beyond my abilities.  Training and the experience exist to prepare nurses to competently handle any situation that may arise in a specific setting, and my lack of both in a delivery room setting could prove dangerous.

While I appreciate Carol’s need to meet the needs of the hospital’s many departments and the stress of her own responsibility to meet many different scheduling needs, I would instead take a collaborating approach so as to demonstrate to Carol that it is a mistake to put me in a unit that I am unfamiliar with.  This issue could be resolved respectively by acknowledging the difficulty of Carol’s position while pointing out that we both want to protect patients and the hospital.  Given my proven flexibility with scheduling and switching units in the past, I don’t believe that Carol would think I was shirking my responsibilities or trying to get out of doing more work than I would in my own unit.

Compromising is often a valid way to deal with conflict management. However, although I could suggest an alternative solution, such as offering to go to a different unit so that a more qualified nurse might be freed up to move to the delivery room, the short notice of Carol’s request implies that there is no one else available, making this a less likely solution than collaboration.  As well, smoothing and avoiding would also not be a good approaches, given that I already tried to enlist the support of the charge nurse, to no avail.  Without my own supervisor available to act as my advocate, this approach would likely not be successful.  I would also not want to take the competing approach unless there was no other way to deal with this situation.  The competing approach sets me up as an adversary to Carol, when we really have the common goal of wanting to see the hospital adequately and properly staffed.

Marquis, B.L. & Huston, C.J. (2008). Leadership roles and management functions in nursing: Theory and application. Hackensack, NJ: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins.