Summary: The Importance Of Nursing Leadership

What constitutes an effective leader? This question is a focus into nursing leadership competency. Nursing leadership competency are leadership skills and behaviors that contribute to superior performance. Nursing leaders are crucial in implementing an empowered and pleased nursing workforce with positive nursing work environments (Laschinger, Wong, Cummings, & Grau, 2014). A focus on leadership competencies and skill development promotes better leadership and high quality, safe health care (Disch, 2017). The leadership style that is chosen affects staff, patient, and organizational outcomes (Laschinger et al., 2014). Creating a safe and trusting environment is of great importance for nursing leadership (Disch, 2017). Decreased patient

The ability for a person to examine their own and other’s feelings and use this information to influence their own thinking and actions is defined as emotional intelligence (Zhu, Liu, Guo, Zhao, & Lou, 2015). Emotional intelligence is self-development concept designed to heighten the control of feelings and interpersonal affiliations (Heckemann, M.G.A. Schols, & Halfens, 2015). Emotional intelligence is important skill for nursing leadership in the fact that nursing is a holistic experience and nurses need to be able to be able to provide emotional, spiritual, and social needs to patients along with their technical skills (Zhu et al., 2015). Having the ability to process one’s own emotions while simultaneously accessing the needs of others is emotional intelligence (Zhu et al., 2015). Emotional intelligence has definite effects on quality of care provided, well-being of employees, and increased work engagement (Zhu et al., 2015). All of these aspects are important for developing emotional intelligence as a leader to be able to coach staff with interventions to take care of negative emotions of staff in self-reflective exercises and peer coaching interventions (Zhu et al., 2015). Emotional intelligence abilities are fundamental for launching empowering work environments in nursing (Heckemann, M.G.A. Schols, & Halfens,

Incivility in the workplace also has negative outcomes related to financial costs related to absenteeism, turnover, lost productivity, and legal actions (Laschinger et al., 2014). Incivility is low caliber deviant behavior intended to derail the target (Laschinger et al., 2014). Incivility in the workplace can escalate to violence and has damaging effects on nurses, patients, and the organization (Laschinger et al., 2014). Having a preventative approach to incivility rather than a reactionary approach can be empowering to the workplace and decreases stressful environments which in turn decreases incivility (Laschinger et al., 2014). Nursing leadership is crucial in putting forth limits and determining the work environment to prevent incivility in the workplace (Laschinger et al., 2014). Incivility is linked to stressful workplace situations caused by employee fatigue and passive management teams (Laschinger et al.,