Managerial Identity In Nursing

Nursing managerial identity

As explained above our managers experience of their hybrid role can be organized into three separate groups depending on their perceived conflict in the hybrid role. However, as we already mentioned, our research have come to conclude additional aspects of their experience that is salient in all groups of managers as it stem from their construction of themselves in their professional-managerial hybrid role. We argue that our concept of a nursing managerial identity may be a result of how the nurse managers combine their past of a nurse with their presence of a manger, enacting the duality of the hybrid role. As through their identity construction one can understand how they experience their hybrid role as it guides

It appears that the conflicts that originates from combining the two logics in a nursing managerial identity is embodied in an identity conflict that causes challenges on an interpersonal level. The managers experience these conflicts with a higher degree of emotional distress than other challenges that they encounter when navigating between the duality of the hybrid role, as for example challenges caused by managers that feel more secure in a clinical setting, or lack of sufficient managerial skills, and long for clinical work (Currie, Croft & Lockett, 2015; Kippist & Fitzgerald, 2009). This could be argued further by the managers tendency to downplay their financial responsibilities and, at occasions, express a rather nonchalant and indifferent view on conflicts that stem from the apparent trade-off between cost and caring, the two divergent objectives of professionalism and managerialism (Blomgren, 2003;Viitanen et al. 2007). It appears that ‘red numbers’ are, for the majority of managers, something they can legitimise by drawing upon their professional background as nurses, hence drive managerial action based on professional values (Currie & Croft, 2015).

In contrast, the challenges of the construct of a nursing managerial identity arise when their ideas about the role and themselves

Our material invites for additional interpretations, however due to the limited scope of our research we have not been able to further unpack and indulge in it. Moreover, we acknowledge that we are not able to determine the managers identities based on single interviews. Nevertheless, during the interviews the managers constructed themselves in ways we understand through the concept of a nursing managerial identity. In addition, we recognize that we are not able to determine to what extent the nursing managerial identity can be understood in the light of their nurse background. In our thesis we have treated the nurse profession as internally heterogeneous, but we accept that the values of care, loyalty, and altruism, which is generally associated with the nurse profession, may be a way to legitimize the nurse profession rather than illustrate an actual ‘truth’. Also, the actual values of the managers may be different from the values expressed during the