Why Diversity Matters in the Nursing Profession

¶ … transformational leaders create a caring team? Transformation leaders create a caring team by emphasizing empathy among team members. Empathy is a very important quality that nurses should cultivate and not everyone knows what it means or how to exercise it -- and yet it is the quality that is at the heart of caring teams (Wiseman, 1996). So what is empathy? Wiseman (1996) states that different people have different ideas about what it means: "listening, caring, understanding, valuing, feeling," for example, are some of the ways that nurses describe empathy (p. 1163).

Yet there is an even better way to define empathy: the "projection of the self into the feelings of others," and "the power of entering into another's personality and imaginatively experiencing his experiences" (p. 1163). Others view it as "intellectual and emotional awareness," which also helps to deepen the concept and give it more dimension. These definitions effectively build on the average definition of the ordinary nurse's concept of the term. Empathy is that which allows the nurse to treat others as he or she would like to be treated.

Doing this leads to the establishment of a great team, because it opens the door for transformational leadership to take place. Transformational leadership requires a healthy dose of Emotional Intelligence (EI), another essential quality of empathy. With good EI, a transformational leader can help steer nurses up the ladder of development by promoting solid virtues and also by leading by example.

The transformational leader looks out and sees what the followers need and then helps to supply that missing link in order to get the team where it needs to be. 2. What is the impact of embracing diversity in the nursing profession? The impact of embracing diversity in the nursing profession is that it helps to promote awareness and understanding. The more aware nurses are the better they can be at their job.

Embracing diversity, not only among workers, but also among patients is a positive first step in being able to treat them appropriately. For instance, the model of Transcultural Assessment that Giger and Davidhizar developed as a result of their study of nursing students was based on six fundamental factors considered to be relevant phenomena. The major phenomena were: time, space, social organization, communication, environmental control and biological variation (Giger, Davidhizar, 2002, p. 185).

The basic concepts and relationships presented by this theory are that it was meant to be a "tool developed to assess cultural values about health and disease behaviors and their effects" (Karabudak, Arslan, Basbakkal, 2013, p. 342). In other words, by first attempting to understand the culture of the patient, using concepts such as time and communication (which are concepts that different cultures think about differently with different expectations), the nurse is able to break down any potential barriers before they become a problem.

In short, by being aware of diverse cultures, a nurse can be better prepared to.