Nursing Leadership Styles Paper

Words: 1036
Pages: 5

Leadership Styles to Improve Quality of Care in Health Care Organizations
Leadership roles are essential in addressing and handling issues and reaching sought out goals in healthcare organizations. Quality and patient safety are major concerns in the United States healthcare system and it is up to our healthcare leaders to bring about changes for improvements in this area. Three types of leadership styles found in healthcare include servant leadership, transformational leadership and laissez-faire leadership.
Servant Leadership
Servant leadership centers on doing as much as possible to lead employees to reaching their goals and meeting their needs (Trastek, Hamilton, & Niles, 2014). In the study by Trastek et al. (2014), challenges faced
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healthcare system by encouraging and motivating their employees (McFadden, Stock, & Gowen, 2015). The study by McFadden et al. (2015) discusses that patient safety is a major issue in healthcare organizations and implementing quality initiatives as well as the appropriate leadership style can improve care and outcomes. In this study, the leadership style that is reported to work best in improving patient safety and quality of care is the transformational leader because they influence and motivate employees to focus on making positive changes (McFadden et al., 2015). The results of this study found that the appropriate transformational leader along with continuous quality improvement (CQI) initiatives improved quality of care; however it did not improve patient safety (McFadden et al., 2015). It was found that patient safety climate (organizational culture) improved patient safety results, therefore it is suggested that a combination of CQI and patient safety climate along with a transformation leader will help to improve overall quality of care and patient safety outcomes (McFadden et al., 2015). According to McFadden et al. (2015), since transformational leaders motivate and influence employees to make changes, these employees are more likely to work to improve patient safety and quality care while not being afraid to speak up to their leader if any issues occur that may effect this process …show more content…
This article discusses the importance of nursing leadership styles in promoting patient safety within healthcare organizations since nurse managers are important components of promoting safety between the organizational culture as whole and their departments (Merrill, 2015). According to Merrill (2014), it was found that nurses practicing a laissez-faire leadership style lead to nurses having a feeling of working in a negative environment, being afraid to ask for help and getting blamed for errors causing them to lose motivation in their work. This study reports that for nurse managers in an organization to improve safety and quality of care, they should not blame employees and instead use errors as a way to educate them to be better at their job (Merrill,