NURS 6053 LEADERSHIP THEORIES IN PRACTICE
Characteristics of a healthy work environment include: well-being recognition, support and caring, trust and interpersonal relationships, justice, and a friendly and joyful environment. Healthy work environments are associated with increased job satisfaction and job engagement, task performance, goal achievement, and high efficiency as a result of positive attitudes and behavior among the staff (Marshall & Broome, 2017). This paper will discuss the impact of leadership behaviors in creating healthy work environments from scholarly articles.
The article by Jiménez et al. (2017) presents a concept of health-promoting leadership that emphasizes the association between the working environment and leadership behavior. The article defines health-promoting leadership using seven key aspects: low workload, health awareness, control, community, reward, fairness, and values. The quality and way of leadership is an aspect that can influence health in the workplace (Jiménez et al., 2017). The article argues that leaders can influence their work surroundings with their attitude and behavior. This is because they are regarded as organizational role models and can thus establish the working conditions for their staff (Jiménez et al., 2017). Furthermore, with thorough deliberation of the seven dimensions of health-promoting leadership, it is feasible for leaders to steadily create a healthy working environment where both leaders and employees can stay healthy.
The medical-surgical unit nursing supervisor in my previous organization employed most of the concepts of health-promoting leadership. She embraced the concept of community by establishing a positive connection between all nurses. She also encouraged nurses to talk openly to each other and support each other, positively impacting the relationship between nurses. Furthermore, she promoted fairness in the workplace, especially in allocating patients and planning nurses’ duties to ensure that there were no shifts that nurses are overburdened from others. The nurse supervisor also gave rewards to the nurses based on staff performance. For instance, she recommended best performing nurses for sponsored courses and rewards for best nurses. The nurse supervisor leadership style was influential in creating and sustaining a healthy work environment for nurses and creating positive relationships between the nurses. This led to increased job engagement and satisfaction and high efficiency, which increased patient outcomes in the medical-surgical unit.
Pourbarkhordari et al. (2017) conducted a study to explore the role of transformational leadership (TFL) from the healthy work environment perspective. TFL has been viewed as crucial in sustaining a healthy work environment. The article argues that leaders who employ the TFL style in treating their subordinates create a healthy, satisfying organizational culture (Pourbarkhordari et al., 2017). TFL has also been associated with improving employees’ engagement and increasing their morale, motivation, and performance by establishing shared values. The article proposes that TFL is increasingly needed in current work environments, which have more knowledgeable and talented employees (Pourbarkhordari et al., 2017). Transformational leaders are critical in developing and sustaining healthy work environments for practice and can create lasting organizational and professional values.
Sfantou et al. (2017) conducted a study to examine whether there exists a relationship between various leadership styles and healthcare quality measures. The study established that leadership styles play a vital role in increasing quality healthcare and nursing measures. Leadership has also been acknowledged as a major indicator for creating a qualitative organizational culture and effective performance in health care delivery (Sfantou et al., 2017). Transformational leadership was found to increase nursing unit organization culture and structural empowerment. This positively impacted organizational commitment for nurses and resulted in higher levels of job satisfaction, nursing retention, higher productivity, patient safety, and positive health outcome.
My current organization has focused on Transformational leadership through training leaders and supporting them in effecting it. The hospital’s nursing services manager is a transformational leader and has encouraged unit leaders to employ TFL to increase nurses’ per