Nursing leaders are, by all means, key figures in facilitating change in the patterns of meaningful and efficient nursing. Organizational culture, which may be defined as a combination of shared values pursued by an organization, plays a vital role in empowering and motivating nurses and nursing leaders. According to Machen et al. (2019), in the nursing paradigm, the notion of organizational culture addresses such concepts as the promotion of professionalism through increasing nurses’ job satisfaction rates and facilitating the overall system change.
However, while nursing leaders may be eager to promote positive change within the professional environment, they frequently face various challenges when trying to gain the administration’s support to implement the change in question. Indeed, according to Grand Canyon University (2018), one of the primary benefits faced by nursing leaders is the lack of support in terms of implementing training, education, or workflow patterns. As a result, nurses feel like their concerns and ideas are not valued by the administration, and the concept of continuous education that has always been one of the fundamental priorities in nursing is ignored. Such neglect for the nurses’ well-being within an organization leads to increasing dissatisfaction rates, burnout, and lack of training that results in poor patient outcomes and increased error probability.
However, the barriers presented by an organization should never be perceived as the lack of access to change per se. In order to facilitate change within the staff, nurse leaders should realize that their mentorship is of paramount importance for the staff, and trying to make the workplace better will result in positive feedback from their colleagues (Carlson, 2017). Hence, the introduction of smaller steps towards improvement may show the administration that putting more effort into securing nursing support and education may become an asset for the whole organization.
References
Carlson, K. (2017). Nursing workplace culture: Change begins with you.
Grand Canyon University. (2018). Nursing leadership & management: Leading and serving [E-book]. Web.
Machen, S., Jani, Y., Turner, S., Marshall, M., & Fulop, N. J. (2019). The role of organizational and professional cultures in medication safety: A scoping review of the literature. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 31(10), G146-G157.