Nurse educators’ perceptions of their own self-leadership: An explorative qualitative inquiry

Abstract

Background and objective: Organisations, including academic institutions, are moving away from the traditional top-down command and control leadership styles to a focus on internal leadership (self-leadership) of staff. In the absence of traditional external leadership, individuals with self-leadership skills and qualities can make smart decisions to achieve organisational success. Despite the availability of literature studies on nurses’ self-leadership, there is a dearth of studies addressing self-leadership in nurse educators. It is imperative that a study exploring nurse educators' perceptions regarding their self-leadership be conducted to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. This would assist in identifying the role that stakeholders play in creating an enabling academic environment that promotes the development, the practice, and supportive interventions of self-leadership. This study sought to explore and describe the perceptions of nurse educators regarding their self-leadership and how this can be facilitated in a nursing education institution (NEI) context.Methods: A qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive research design was used to provide an in-depth exploration of the perceptions of nurse educators regarding their self-leadership in an NEI setting. Four semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted with purposively selected nurse educators, and audiotaped until data saturation resulted. The researcher and an independent coder analysed the data using Tesch protocols on thematic analysis. Lincoln and Guba’s strategies were used to achieve trustworthiness.Results: Two themes emerged, namely: nurse educators’ perceptions of self-leadership; and the facilitation of self-leadership in nurse educators.Conclusions: The nurse educators mirrored themselves as leaders in action and are aware of the importance of their engagement in self-leadership activities in learning and teaching. Facilitating self-leadership within nurse educators was perceived to be the responsibility of individual nurse educators, and to a certain extent their colleagues, and that of the institutional management team.

An autonomy-supportive climate for facilitation of self-leadership in health sciences educators

“…The participants’ positive response to this item could be attributed to them assenting to the reality that educators need to be agile to adapt and respond to the ever-changing teaching climate and health developments (Klar 2020 ). When empowered with an autonomy-supportive climate, educators practise self-leadership to transform individuals, health care and educational systems and the society, support social justice, and contribute to the development of underserved communities (Matahela 2022 ). Thus, educators should in turn create an autonomy-supportive climate for students by being mindful of the disparities experienced by students on issues related to access to required learning and teaching equipment and milieu (Klar 2020 ).…”

The Challenges to Women’s Entrepreneurial Involvement in the Hospitality Industry

“…Moreover, the literature reveals that self-leadership behavior facilitates in implementation of policies on gender (Yenilmez 2018). Self-leadership is defined as "the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling, and action towards your objective(s)" (Matahela 2022).…”

Motivation as a facilitator of self-leadership in nurse academics

“…Self-leadership is purported to be based on how individuals define their meaningfulness through goals and purpose, how they own up to their actions based on own set standards and mobilising external resources and utilise them to achieve the chosen standard ( Manz, 1986 ). Nurse academics’ engagement in self-leadership could empower them to self-reflect and introspect to gain clarity on their actions when interacting with others, whilst intentionally contributing meaningfully to the ANI ( Matahela, 2022 ). Thus, nurse academics should intensely focus on self-goal setting which conforms to their idealised perception of how they should behave to achieve the set performance standards and motivate themselves to reach the performance standard.…”