Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Person-centered leadership in the workplace governs better outcomes through affording dignity, respect, compassion, caring and coordinated support resulting in personal and professional growth for all team members. A person-centered workplace culture needs effective leadership to deliver high quality services and ensure human progress. We intended to explore person-centered leadership as a way of transforming the workplace culture. A qualitative consensus design guided the study. Forty-six nurse educators and nurse managers were purposively sampled. During a consensus meeting, participants explored the influence of leadership practices on creating a person-centered workplace culture. Data were thematically analyzed. Four themes related to person-centered leadership emerged during the consensus meeting, namely: leadership skills, leading change, collaborative decision making and workplace motivation. We recommend that leaders adopt person-centered leadership values to create a positive workplace culture for employees.
Key concepts: person-centered leadership, transformation, workplace culture, person centeredness
Introduction and background
Person-centered workplace cultures require person-centered leadership that uses strategies such as empowering and engaging employees, strengthening governance and accountability, coordinating services around employee needs, integrating effective networks, creating and enabling the environment for change (McCance & McCormack, 2017; World Health Organization, 2015). Person-centered leadership improves the workplace culture for better outcomes by affording dignity, respect, compassion, caring and coordinated support to enable all individuals to grow (Harding, Wait & Scrutton, 2015). This article reports on stakeholders' views regarding ways to use person-centered leadership for transforming the workplace culture in South African nursing education institutions.
According to Alonso-Almeida, Perramon and Bagur-Femenias (2017) a gap exists in research on transformational leadership styles for organizational sustainability, effective management and optimal organizational performance. Some researchers encourage organizations to use evidence-based methods to facilitate transformation in the workplace using a person-centered leadership approach to achieve better outcomes and performance. Person-centered leaders motivate their employees to achieve organizational goals (Cardiff, McCormack & McCance, 2018; McCormack & Dewing 2019; Lynch, McCormack, McCance & Brown, 2018).
Recently, acceptable leadership styles have shifted from the traditional hierarchal lead er or "follow me" approach, to a person-centered approach of being an "associate" leader, reflecting humanistic values to guide nursing practice. Person-centered leadership promotes self-awareness, but is also other-centered so that both the leader and the employee flourish and achieve better organizational outcomes (Cardiff, McCormack & McCance, 2018). Leaders who...