Four Core Virtues in Nursing Practice and Leadership
This paper examines four virtues central to professional nursing practice: compassion, integrity, humility, and courage. Drawing on Crigger and Godfrey's transformational ethics framework and Pask's work on nurses' professional self, the paper defines each virtue, illustrates how it shapes clinical decision-making, and explores the ethical dilemmas nurses encounter when virtues appear to conflict. The paper also outlines practical strategies nurse leaders can employ to foster virtue growth in nursing students and staff, including extended clinical time, role modeling, and case-based learning. Together, these virtues and leadership strategies support nurses in fulfilling their moral and ethical obligations to patients.
- Introduction to Nursing Virtues: Defines virtues and introduces the four central to nursing
- Compassion in Nursing Practice: Compassion as emotional responsiveness and care commitment
- Integrity, Humility, and Courage: Three virtues guiding ethical clinical decisions
- Strategies Nurse Leaders Can Use to Promote Virtue Growth: Role modeling, clinical time, and case studies
- Conclusion: Virtues as the ethical foundation of nursing
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- Each virtue is clearly defined and immediately grounded in a clinical or professional context, making abstract ethical concepts concrete and applicable.
- The paper uses a real ethical dilemma (a nurse torn between compassion and integrity regarding a patient's family reunification) to demonstrate how virtues interact and sometimes conflict in practice.
- The transition from individual virtue analysis to leadership strategy is logical and purposeful, showing awareness of how organizational context shapes ethical development.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper integrates two sources consistently throughout, using them both to define concepts and to provide evidence-based examples. Rather than citing sources only in an introductory literature review, the writer weaves Crigger and Godfrey (2011) and Pask (2005) into each section to support specific claims — a technique that demonstrates sustained engagement with scholarly material rather than surface-level referencing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a brief introduction that frames the four virtues and introduces the anchor source. It then dedicates a focused passage to each virtue in turn, followed by a standalone section on leadership strategies. This parallel structure — define, contextualize, illustrate — is applied consistently across all four virtues, giving the essay a clear and easy-to-follow organization appropriate for an undergraduate nursing or ethics course.
Introduction to Nursing Virtues
Virtues can be defined simply as the habits of character that predispose persons to do what is right and moral. In the nursing profession, virtues are the habits that promote and affirm the values of independence, health, respect, well-being, and human dignity. Four virtues have been shown to be central to the nursing profession and its practice: compassion, humility, courage, and integrity. Nurses are expected to conduct themselves in accordance with these four virtues at all times.
Elizabeth Pask's article, "Self-Sacrifice, Self-Transcendence, and Nurses' Professional Self," demonstrates how nurses can be guided by these four virtues to make the right decisions when faced with difficult circumstances in their practice. The sections below detail how each virtue influences an individual's practice, and what a nurse leader could do to support the growth of virtues and enable nurses to fulfill their moral and ethical obligations.
References
Crigger, N. & Godfrey, N. (2010). The Making of Nurse Professionals: A Transformational, Ethical Approach. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Pask, E. J. (2005). Self-sacrifice, self-transcendence, and nurses' professional self. Nursing Philosophy, 6(4), 247–254.
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.