Moral Courage and the Nurse Leader, Essay Example

In order to implement ethical leadership, it is imperative for nurses to incorporate motivation and cooperation into their practices. While the knowledge and experience of an individual nurse is valuable, it is maximally beneficial for nurses to work together as a member of a team. As a consequence, the most valuable form of leadership in nursing is the ability to motivate the team in a manner that promotes the well-being of the patients. Furthermore, ethical leadership provides nurses with moral courage by providing the team with the ability to report dangerous behaviors or mistakes to the supervisors in order to prevent further harm. This involves promoting moral courage in the workplace (Edmonson, 2010). A valuable leadership style used to accomplish these means is through transformational leadership, which allows the leader to build the skills of his or team members by assigning them to projects that will require them to build upon their skills, thereby improving the value of the team (Judge et al., 2004).

It would be useful to implement transformational leadership in the obstetrics ward because doing so would provide nurses of various levels with the ability to learn new things. Regardless of experience level, nurses will be able to learn new techniques and gain a greater understanding of the field under this type of supervision. Furthermore, a leader that promotes moral courage will improve the quality of care that all patients receive. Typically, some nurses are worried about mistakes that have made in addition to the repercussions they may receive for committing these mistakes. Therefore, it is beneficial to report to a leader that would welcome reports of these errors to implement damage control. In order for leadership practices to be ethical in obstetrics, it would be necessary to implement a culture of trust which will ultimately benefit both the patients and the nurses.

References

Edmonson C. (2010). Moral Courage and the Nurse Leader. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues  in Nursing, 15(3): Manuscript 5.

Judge TA, Piccolo RF. (2004). Transformational and Transactional Leadership: A Meta-Analytic Test of Their Relative Validity. Journal of Applied Psychology 89(5): 755-68.