Nursing leadership theories are formed to create excellent leaders that accommodate the objectives of the team and these theories allow the team members to understand different leadership situations. This following scholarly paper describes a case study of conflicts regarding a new graduate nurse who experiences a rude behavior from a senior colleague during the workplace. This paper explains the application of emotional intelligence theory and how a nurse can provide leadership in this situation.
Definition
Emotional intelligence is outlined as the capacity of a people to discover, evaluate, and control their own emotions and feelings, the emotions of other people and groups (Goleman & Gardner, 2014).
Concepts of theory
Daniel Goleman’s model of emotional intelligence theory focuses on a wide variety of competencies and skills that improve leadership performance. It mainly focused on five areas self- awareness, self -regulation, social skill, empathy, and motivation. Self- awareness means understanding of own’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, and objectives to recognize their effects on other people while using gut feelings to guide other team members. Social skills include managing emotions of others to move people in the one direction. Empathy describes recognizing, understanding and considering other people’s feelings especially when making any decision. Motivation means motivating person to achieve something for the sake of success (Goleman & Gardner, 2014).
Application of leadership skills
As a nurse leader, there are many ways to deal with this situation. Daniel Goleman (2006), presented the concept of emotional intelligence in which he relates the emotional intelligence to four elements, these are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social skills. We applied nursing leadership skills to our case study according to these four elements:
Self-awareness: Firstly, the nurse can use this method to be self-aware to understand herself. She finds her strengths and weaknesses as a person and a leader. She can understand why she feels in this way, and what makes her feel like this. If she understands her emotions, she can identify their impact on herself and those in her team.
Self-management: In this element, the nurse can try to be in control of what she says or do, while avoiding the temptation to make a rushed decision, a nurse can observe her actions and reduce the chances of compromises with her own values and beliefs.
Social awareness: Social awareness is the ability of a leader to understand the emotions of the team members and this element linked to empathy (Goleman, 2006). The nurse uses her empathy to understand the emotion of senior nurse why she thinks this way. She can do this also by talking to the senior nurse.
Social skills: The nurse can try to develop and maintain a good relationship with a senior nurse and communicate clearly with her. She can talk to a senior nurse calmly to identify the problem. The graduate nurse builds trust so that the senior nurse understands that the graduate nurse is doing her work properly and knowledgeably. A graduate nurse can try to work well in a team and take action to avoid any further conflicts (Crowne et al., 2017).
Other resources
Surround herself with good people: Nurse can surround herself with good people. Fill her time with the positive people to avoid conflict and tension to some extent. It can increase her confidence to deal with a situation effectively.
Have a strong mindset: Nurse can bring a positive perspective to work. Negativity is always out there, but if she strengthens her mindset, she can change how she react to negativity.
Communicate with the person: When the nurse starts to feel confident. She may decide to approach that senior nurse and ask her about her behavior. But she keeps in mind that she handles the situation carefully without arguing. She can try to explain to her about the situation.
Do not take it personally: It is a very important resource to deal with rude behavior at work but also the hardest thing to do. We all take things personally. It is not easy to avoid conflict situations.
As a nurse leader how, I could provide leadership in this case scenario:
Self-emotional appraisal: This is the person’s ability to understand their deep emotions and they should be able to express these emotions naturally.
Other’s emotional appraisal: This relates to the people’s ability to perceive and understand the emotions of people around them (Crowne et al., 2017).
Regulation of emotions: This involves the ability of people to regulate their emotions which will help them to recover from psychological distress.
Use of emotions: It involves the ability of an individual to make use of these emotions to facilitate the performances by directing them towards the activities (Law & Wong, 2002).
As a nurse leader, I should try to know the strengths and weaknesses of new graduate nurses as nobody learned everything from home, we learned from our mistakes and with experience. First of all, I will orient the new staff to the whole department where she is going to work, then I will give work to her that she can do in a particular time and as a nurse leader, I will assist her and observe her doing the procedures so that I can correct her mistakes. If another nurse wants to take help from me, as nurse, it is my responsibility to help every person in my area and at the end of duty, I will appreciate the new staff for her work so that she can gain confidence and will try to work more and to learn more from day to day activities in the hospital and will become an independent staff in a short period.
Reference
Goleman, D. (2006). Emotional Intelligence (10th anniversary ed.). New York, NY; London: Bantam Books.
Goleman, D., & Gardner, H. (2014). Emotional Intelligence Goleman. Learning theories. Retrieved from https://www.learning-theories.com
Crowne, K. A., Young, T. M., Goldman, B., Patterson, B., Krouse, A. M., & Proenca, J. (2017). Leading nurses: Emotional intelligence and leadership development effectiveness. Leadership in Health Services, 30(3), 217-232. Retrieved from http://libaccess.senecacollege.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libaccess.senecacollege.ca/docview/1917620411?accountid=28610
Wong, C., & Law, K. (2002). The effects of leader and follower emotional intelligence on performance and attitude: An exploratory study. The Leadership Quarterly, 13(3), 243-274. Retrieved from https://www-sciencedirect-com.libaccess.senecacollege.ca/science/article/pii/S1048984302000991