Ethics, Leadership, and Nurse Staffing: An Aristotelian View
This paper examines the ethical, moral, and leadership dimensions of a nursing staffing dilemma through the lens of Aristotelian and utilitarian conceptual frameworks. The author describes a workplace situation in which inadequate shift scheduling led to nurse burnout, low job satisfaction, and increased risk of patient harm. Drawing on transformational leadership principles, the paper narrates how speaking up to administration resulted in meaningful departmental change. The discussion also addresses the nurse's role as a moral agent and the broader implications of understaffing for patient care quality, ultimately arguing that pursuing the common good is central to ethical nursing leadership.
- Ethical Framework: Utilitarian and Aristotelian ethics introduced
- Ethical Dilemma Encountered in the Workplace: Understaffing crisis and decision to escalate
- Leadership Style: Transformational leadership applied to department change
- Implications for Patient Care: Staffing gaps linked to nursing error and patient risk
- Nurse as Moral Agent: Ethical duties and moral responsibility of nurses
- Conclusion: Common good and transformational leadership summarized
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its argument in a clearly stated theoretical framework — the Aristotelian distinction between ethics, morals, and laws — before applying it directly to a real workplace scenario, giving the analysis coherent structure.
- The first-person narrative of the staffing dilemma is specific and concrete, making abstract ethical concepts tangible and demonstrating genuine engagement with course material.
- The paper connects individual actions (speaking up to administration) to broader outcomes (patient safety, staff retention, cost reduction), demonstrating systems-level thinking appropriate for a nursing leadership context.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This paper demonstrates applied ethical reasoning: taking established philosophical frameworks (Aristotelian ethics and utilitarianism) and systematically using them to analyze a lived professional experience. Rather than describing theories in the abstract, the author maps each concept — ethics, morality, law, the common good — onto specific behaviors observed in the workplace, showing how theory informs practice.
Structure breakdown
The paper follows a problem-solution-reflection arc across six sections. It opens by defining the conceptual framework, then describes a concrete ethical dilemma, explains the leadership approach used to address it, assesses implications for patient care, reflects on the nurse's role as a moral agent, and closes with a synthesis conclusion. This logical progression mirrors the reflective practice model common in nursing education.
Ethical Framework
The utilitarian ethical framework can be used by leaders to help identify the common good that a community should pursue before individual self-interest (Mill, 1859). This is also known as a practical approach to ethics. The ethical standards and principles used to guide and teach people to be moral are rooted in this concept: one does good so that the whole community benefits, rather than any single individual benefiting at the expense of the rest. It is a concept that allows people to recognize that others around them have a right to a happy existence. It also helps reduce the kind of competition and self-advancement that people can pursue in the workplace out of a desire to get ahead or because of petty dislikes for colleagues.
Ethical Dilemma Encountered in the Workplace
In my workplace, it became apparent that nursing shifts were not being sufficiently covered. The nurse manager responsible for scheduling was not doing an effective job of ensuring that all shifts were filled. As a result, several nights a week, nurses were pulling double duty and working extra hours to cover a missing shift that should have been filled by another nurse. This was leading to overwork and burnout, and it was making the entire department feel joyless. A number of nurses were complaining, and it was obvious that job satisfaction was suffering as a result. Some nurses were thinking about quitting. The issue was even threatening patient well-being, because medical errors tend to occur more frequently when nurses are overworked (IOM, 2000).
I recognized that if I wanted to be considered a leader, I should speak up about this problem and bring it to a higher manager in the administration. I showed how the nurse manager's routine failure to cover shifts in the schedule was destabilizing the workplace, which could lead to patient harm and high staff turnover — both of which would result in greater costs for the facility in the long run. Even though I feared potential blowback from the nurse manager making the schedules, I knew I had to take a stand and speak to the administration, because the nurse manager in our department was not listening to our concerns and had not corrected the situation even after we brought it to her attention over the course of several weeks. She continued to understaff the shifts, and it was clearly taking its toll on the nursing staff.
Leadership Style
In this role, I was using transformational leadership — I had listened to lower-level nurses, heard their complaints, identified their issues and needs, and was now working to bring about change in the department. My goal was to help transform it into a better-functioning workplace where nurses could feel respected, healthy, not overworked, and refreshed when they came on shift. Transformational leadership is well suited to overseeing a change management process because it uses the leader's vision to guide the process to completion. I presented a clear picture to the administration of where we were and where we could and should be — and the response was favorable.
Conclusion
Having an ethical framework is important for any leader. In this case, the nurse manager was not operating within the ethical framework promoted within our community. She was ignoring the greater good and the imperative to pursue the common good for all, and was instead focusing on how she could avoid putting in the extra time and effort required to build a schedule that ensured all shifts were covered. As a leader applying a transformational leadership style, I listened to lower-level nurses, heard their concerns, identified their needs, and developed a vision that I could bring to the administration in order to effect real change. That change went on to improve patient care, since nurses provide higher-quality care when they are rested and not overburdened.
References
Chowdhury, M. (2016). Emphasizing morals, values, ethics and character education in science education and science teaching. The Malaysian Online Journal of Educational Science, 4(2), 1–16.
IOM. (2000). To err is human. Retrieved from https://www.nap.edu/read/9728/chapter/1#ii
Kristjansson, K. (2014). There is something about Aristotle: The pros and cons of Aristotelianism in contemporary moral education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48(1), 48–68.
Mill, J. S. (1859). On Liberty. London: John W. Parker and Son, West Strand.
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