Team Leadership of Nurse Academics in a Research Programme in a Higher Education Setting

Purpose: Leadership refers to ‘a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal’ (Northouse, 2013). A common theme that generally runs through definitions is that leadership presupposes guiding the attitudes, beliefs, behaviours, and feelings of other people (Curtis, De Vries & Sheerin, 2011). A self-leadership development programme was created in 2012 for ten nursing academics with the aim of empowering them to embark upon research projects, write for subject matter publications, and develop as leaders at a school of nursing in the Western Cape. This study explored and described nurse academics’ understanding of the meaning of self-leadership in the team, as well as their underlying individual motivational processes in the context of an educational setting that lead to team leadership.

Methods: A qualitative, exploratory, narrative, and contextual study was conducted with a sample of eight participants who were lecturers in an undergraduate nursing programme. The researcher collected data on their experiences of team leadership during the programme by means of individual narratives. The narrative method is a form of qualitative research in which data is collected using the stories of the participants as told by the participants themselves or by other people on their behalf (Munhall, 2012). Participants wrote their narratives over a period of 3 months, after attending a team leadership workshop. The participants were seven female and one male nurse educators between the ages of 28 to 57 yearsAn open coding method of data analysis was followed to transpose collected data into meaningful data.The researcher maintained trustworthiness using Guba’s criteria model.

Results: The participants were between the ages of 28 and 57 years. Two main themes emerged from the data analysis, namely leadership attributes and responsibilities towards the group.Themes also confirmed the underlying dynamic of personal and professional growth moving towards team leadership.  Nursing academics were motivated to use their self-influence to direct themselves to achieve optimum performance in the team. Broadly speaking, the meaning attached to self-leadership was closely linked to concepts of shared and team leadership, reflective leadership, and collaborative leadership that were concepts leading to group leadership according to the leadership framework of Jooste (2011).

Conclusion: Team leadership is regarded as an essential component of leadership and an integral aspect of the nursing academic’s role.A person must first be able to lead himself / herself, before the next level of effective team leadership can be attained.