Nurse Leadership and Empowerment Performance

Nurse Leadership and Empowerment

Performance and morale are deeply inextricable characteristics in any professional working environment. This is doubly so in the context of nursing, where the emotional pressure and physical toll levied upon nurses are considerable and where the consequences of failure are extremely high. This means that there is a considerable importance in how well nurse managers work to create a positive environment for those under their leadership.

Reversible Negatives:

With respect to the surveys responses, these connections are highly observable. Both performance and morale suffer, from the perspective of respondents, due to a high-pressure work environment. However, these are patterns that can be corrected through an improvement of the operating environment in question. This must center largely on the day-to-day experiences of nursing professionals with such features as the division of labor, the collaboration with colleagues and the degree of communicative openness of leadership being subjected to the greatest examination. Strategies for empowerment of personnel such as Networking and Developing Relationships will be critical to reversing negatives in nurse perceptions.

Empowerment:

For nursing leadership to help lead improvements in this crucial areas of operation, some degree of interpersonal networking should be employed. This can help to lead to general improvements in the communication and personal comfort created between nurse managers and general registered nurses. In order for leadership to exhibit any kind of authority, it must create an internal culture in which individual nurses feel empowered to do their best work. This creates a feeling of loyalty that is crucial to preserving this authority. Accordingly, Grossman & Valiga (2005) advise that "much like those that promote creativity and human development in general, environments that promote the development and enhancement of leadership skills and abilities are open, trust, and dynamic." (Grossman & Valiga, p. 165)

The text goes on to assert that the creation of such an environment should be at least in part facilitated by the establishment of open lines of communication. Where nurses feel free to voice concerns, express positions based on professional experience and contribute to courses of treatment, feelings of morale and therefore performance levels are both likely to be higher. Therefore, the use of networking as a way of improving the multidirectional nature of communication is tantamount to helping reverse some of the negative personnel experiences demonstrated by the surveys.