NUR 514 APA Assignment: Leadership Style Reflective Essay APA Assignment: Leadership Style Reflective Essay

NUR 514 APA Assignment: Leadership Style Reflective Essay

APA Assignment: Leadership Style Reflective Essay

Self-awareness and effective leadership are critical attributes for nurse practitioners. Nurses and nurse leaders require reflective approaches to understand their leadership attributes and improve self-awareness. Self-awareness allows nurse leaders and nurses to recognize their strengths, weaknesses, and values. Understanding one’s emotional intelligence level and leadership style helps in developing effective leadership for nurse practitioners in different settings (Cummings et al., 2021). The purpose of this paper is to reflect on leadership style based on self-awareness tests. The paper explores the different self-assessment tests and their results, leadership style closely aligning with the nursing philosophy, characteristics of an effective professional nurse leader, and a leadership theory that supports professional nurse leaders in different ways like collaboration and conflict resolution.

Rationale and Summary of Self-Assessment Tests

Self-assessment tests like personality assessment and learning styles assessment allow nurses and nurse leaders to enhance their skills by understanding their personalities and values. As a critical part of healthcare delivery, nurses must have sufficient skills based on their values and attributes to influence patients and attain quality outcomes (Grossman et al., 2021). The three self-assessment tests that I took include the VARK learning style questionnaire, the values profile assessment, and the Big 5 personality test. These tools while presenting diverse outcomes illustrated my exceptional nursing leadership skills and abilities to influence others in practice. The rationale for deploying these tools was to ascertain the various leadership attributes that I possess and ways to improve them in the nursing practice context.

The VARK learning assessment showed that I am a robust kinesthetic learner with effective coordination abilities and a sense of body timing. The trait is essential as it ensures that patients’ needs and healthcare workers’ concerns are a priority for nurse leaders (Cummings et al., 2021). The value profile assessment showed that my personality is based on dominant values that include caring followed by social attributes and realistic values. These values are essential when dealing with patients and subordinates as one listens to them. The values also imply that I can negotiate policies that benefit patients. The Big 5 personality test showed that I am extroverted implying that I relate easily with patients and healthcare workers. This trait is essential for transformational and servant leaders in nursing who seek the best of patients and even providers, especially fellow nurses and other healthcare workers.

Leadership Style Aligning with Philosophy of Care

Nurses and nurse leaders develop their philosophy of care to guide their interaction with patients and care delivery. Such philosophies entail values and attributes that make one unique and focused on their role as a nurses in different specialty areas. In this case, my nursing philosophy is developing an innovative and transformative health environment to care for patients from diverse backgrounds based on inherent values and the dignity of human beings. As such, the leadership style that aligns with the philosophy is transformation which emphasizes openness to work and enables leaders to seek innovative ideas from the team. Transformational leaders encourage innovative team thinking and diversity of ideas. They embrace divergent views and integrate them to offer quality care through models like evidence-based practice (EBP) (Brunt et al., 2023). Transformational leadership aligns with this philosophy as it implores nurse leaders to work with all stakeholders to deliver quality care by considering emerging aspects and concepts based on innovative models (Stanley et al., 2021). What appeals to me about this leadership style is its futuristic perspective and helping others grow for the greater common good. The implication is that transformational leaders nurture their subordinates to deliver quality care to patients.

Integration of Elements of Transformational Leadership in Health Care Setting

Transformational leadership is a critical leadership model in nursing because of its attributes or components. These include individualized or personalized consideration, intellectual stimulation, idealized influence, and inspirational motivation. These factors are essential in healthcare settings where leaders influence subordinates through their interactive work. For instance, individualized consideration entails a leader attending to the individual needs of each follower and mentors, coaches, and guide