NUR 431 Module 2 Short Paper Example

A New Graduate, a Veteran and a Traveler: Situational and Transformational Leadership on One Night Shift

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

NUR 431: Leadership Practices for the Professional Nurse

Module Two Short Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.

A New Graduate, a Veteran and a Traveler: Situational and Transformational Leadership on One Night Shift

Leadership theories are easiest to learn in a classroom and hardest to use at 2 a.m. This paper takes one composite night shift at Ridgeline Community Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital, and applies two theories to it: situational leadership, which matches the leader's behavior to each follower's readiness, and transformational leadership, which aims to inspire followers toward shared goals and develop their capacity. It argues that situational leadership tells the night supervisor what each nurse needs tonight, while transformational leadership explains what kind of team the supervisor is trying to build over months, and that a good leader needs both. The hospital, staff and events are composites.

The Shift

On the inpatient side that night were three registered nurses. Kai graduated three months ago and had just finished orientation. Pat has worked at Ridgeline for twenty years and knows every physician, every family in town and every workaround in the building. Morgan is a traveler on the first night of a thirteen-week contract, experienced in a large hospital but new to a setting where the lab technician is on call from home and the hospitalist appears on a screen. Around midnight, a swing-bed patient began to show early signs of sepsis, an emergency department patient needed admission, and the supervisor had to decide who should do what.

Situational Leadership

Situational leadership, developed by Hersey and Blanchard, holds that no single style works for everyone; the leader adjusts the balance of directive behavior, telling people what to do and how, and supportive behavior, listening and encouraging, to the follower's readiness for a specific task (Hersey et al., 2013). Readiness combines ability and willingness or confidence, and it is task-specific: a nurse can be highly ready for one task and not for another.

Applied to this shift, Kai was willing but inexperienced with a deteriorating patient, which calls for a telling or guiding style: clear direction, specific steps and close follow-up. The supervisor assigned Kai the new admission, a lower-risk task, and checked in at set times. Pat was able and confident with sepsis recognition and knew the local escalation path, which calls for a delegating style: hand over the task and stay available. Pat took the swing-bed patient. Morgan was highly able clinically but unfamiliar with Ridgeline's systems, which calls for a participating style: shared decision-making with support on local processes. The supervisor paired Morgan with Pat to learn the on-call lab process during the sepsis workup, and asked Morgan how the larger hospital handled similar situations.

Transformational Leadership

Bass and Riggio (2006) describe transformational leadership through four elements: acting in ways that earn followers' trust and respect, offering a vision that gives the work meaning, pushing the team to rethink habits and try fresh approaches to old problems, and paying attention to each person's needs and growth. It is less about the next task and more about developing followers and building commitment to shared goals. On this shift, the supervisor's transformational work was smaller and slower. Asking Morgan what the previous hospital did differently was the third element, encouraging new thinking; it treated the traveler as a source of ideas, not only a pair of hands. Noticing Kai's anxiety and debriefing after the admission, including what went well, was attention to one person's growth. Staying calm, visible and honest about the risk to the septic patient modeled the behavior the supervisor wants from everyone.

What the Evidence Says

Research supports the value of relational leadership in nursing. In a systematic review of 129 quantitative studies, Cummings et al. (2018) reported that relational styles, transformational leadership among them, went along with more favorable results for nurses in areas such as job satisfaction, well-being and working relationships, while task-focused styles were associated with poorer outcomes. A more recent systematic review focused on transformational leadership and concluded that it improves nurses' work environments both directly and indirectly, through structural empowerment, organizational commitment and job satisfaction, while noting that nurses rarely rated their own managers' transformational behavior as excellent (Ystaas et al., 2023). Neither review tested situational leadership directly, and both relied mostly on surveys, which limits claims about cause.

Comparing the Two Theories

The two theories answer different questions. Situational leadership answers, what does this nurse need from me for this task right now? It is practical and fast, which suits a night shift where the supervisor has minutes to make assignments. Its weakness is that it can reduce leadership to task matching, leaving little room for vision or development. Transformational leadership answers, what kind of team am I building and how do I help each person grow? It explains why the supervisor invests in debriefs and in asking the traveler's opinion, but it offers less guidance on the immediate assignment. Used together, they give the supervisor a way to be directive when safety demands it and developmental whenever there is room.

What the Supervisor Did Differently

Before this analysis, the supervisor's habit was to give the sickest patient to the most experienced nurse and leave everyone else alone. That habit is partly situational, but it ignored readiness differences among the others and missed the chance to develop them. After this shift, the supervisor began assigning tasks with each nurse's readiness in mind, pairing travelers with long-time staff for local processes, and holding a five-minute debrief after any deterioration. Over the following month, two travelers asked to extend their contracts, and Kai asked to take the next sepsis patient with Pat as backup, a sign of growing readiness.

Conclusion

One night shift with three different nurses shows why leadership theory matters. Situational leadership guided the assignments that kept a septic patient safe and a new graduate supported. Transformational leadership explained the smaller acts, a question to a traveler and a debrief with a new nurse, that build a team able to handle the next night with less direction. The evidence favors relational leadership, and this shift showed that relational leadership still depends on sound task decisions.

References

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cummings, G. G., Tate, K., Lee, S., Wong, C. A., Paananen, T., Micaroni, S. P. M., & Chatterjee, G. E. (2018). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 85, 19-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2018.04.016

Hersey, P., Blanchard, K. H., & Johnson, D. E. (2013). Management of organizational behavior: Leading human resources (10th ed.). Pearson.

Ystaas, L. M. K., Nikitara, M., Ghobrial, S., Latzourakis, E., Polychronis, G., & Constantinou, C. S. (2023). The impact of transformational leadership in the nursing work environment and patients' outcomes: A systematic review. Nursing Reports, 13(3), 1271-1290. https://doi.org/10.3390/nursrep13030108