Content area
Full Text
applied management
Nadeem Moiden looks at leadership style and theory and relates developments through history to leadership in today's profession
IT IS A HALLMARK of an advanced civilisation that leaders receive their authority from the group they guide and maintain their lead. However since ancient times, the practice and theory of leadership have engaged the interest of humankind.
Before 1980, there was a lack of nursing leadership research in the UK; even until the late 1980s the literature is scarce. The debate surrounding nursing leadership is closely linked to the political and organisational changes that have influenced nurse management in the UK over the past 20 years and while leadership and management are recognised as two separate issues, changes to one are likely to affect the other. It is therefore difficult to discuss leadership in nursing without placing it in its political, managerial and historical context. As the body of research evidence increases leadership is being viewed as a complex relationship between leaders and followers and all the variables that have an impact on them (Yura et al 1981).
The available literature relates to two periods: the late 19th and the late 20th centuries. The former period saw the embryonic development of the modern nursing profession, while the latter saw an intense academic evolution of nursing, with the transfer of most nursing education to universities.
Structural professionalisation has contributed to the change of style in nurse leadership, reducing its traditionally autocratic characteristics while simultaenously increasing the rational and bureaucratic elements in the repertoire of current nurse leaders.
The development of leadership
A selective exploration of references to nursing in the 19th century, which chiefly concern voluntary hospitals, reveals specific characteristics of leadership. These include an emphasis on the practical and domestic aspects of management, on religious ideals and social conscience and on an autocratic and feminised style of leadership in which it was understood that the matron would have been from a higher social class than the sisters (Klakovich 1994).
In its early years, nursing had first a religious and then a military provenance (Abel-- Smith 1960). Florence Nightingale, who organised nursing for the first time by founding a school of nursing in the late 19th century, perceived there were two groups of...