¶ … Leadership and Management The issue at hand is nursing turnover and nursing shortage. There are many areas of the country where there are chronic nursing shortages. Using a situation like this can be an effective means of illustrating the differences between management and leadership. A manager is seen as someone who is mainly an administrator -- someone who allocates resources in the organization. Leadership relates specifically to the human elements, such as motivation, engagement, vision, organizational culture and buy-in. In essence, where management is a function, leadership pertains to relationships (Maccoby, 2000). Thus, both management and leadership can provide responses to the problems of nurse shortage and turnover, but those approaches will differ from one another, differences relating to the differences between management and leadership.

A manager will look to resource-based strategies for dealing with the issue. A manager can, for example, improve the capability of the organization to attract and retain nurses. That might mean increasing the spending on nurses -- higher salaries, better benefits, and these can be benchmarked against other companies in the region. The result is that if the organization offers more, it can attract more talent, better talent, and it is more likely to retain that talent. A manager thus deploys more resources to solving the problem in order to improve the organizational outcomes. This is a mitigation strategy, but there are other strategies as well, such as adaptation...

So perhaps the most complex tasks can go to those employees who do have a long tenure, saving simpler tasks for the less-experienced nurses. Staffing levels can be adjusted so that the negative effects of shortages are spread out across the work week in order to minimize the negative impacts on performance. Better training programs can increase the capabilities of the existing workers, so that they are more efficient. Such training would in particular increase the capabilities of all the new workers. In many instances, adaptation strategies are necessary because the nursing shortage is global in nature, and it also relates to the rise in demand for health care -- hospital managers are only one part of the tactical solution (Nevidjon & Erickson, 2001)
The leadership solution is going to be relationship-based by its nature. One of the perspectives is that a good leader can allow an organization to separate itself from the pack with respect to its ability to build a high quality nursing workforce. The better the leadership, the more the organization can insulate itself from the overall nursing shortage. One strategy, as advocated by Laschinger & Finegan (2005) is to increase empowerment of the existing workforce. This can be an effective means of building a better workforce, through training and developing…