Guidelines for the Facilitation of Self-Leadership in Nurse Educators

Self-leadership is a process through which people influence themselves to achieve self-direction and self-motivation necessary to behave and perform in desirable ways by setting their own standards and objectives and strategic analysis of their actions (Houghton & Neck, 2002:672; Manz, 2015:135).

Nurse educators are coordinators of programmes, disciplines, subjects and projects in the institutions and are recognized as very strong role models who can easily foster the leadership development of student nurses (Halstead, 2013:4). However, leadership experts such as Neck and Manz (2007:2) indicate that one cannot be expected to lead others effectively if they are unable to lead ‘the self’ effectively. The challenges that nurse educators meet during teaching and learning require nurse educators who are creative, innovative, resilient and self-leaders. Individuals with self-leadership have high degrees of internal motivation, that is, they have the internal drive to expect more of themselves and persist through difficulties until they achieve their goals (Watson, 2006:460).

Although nurse educators are expected to be role models and leaders who promote the professional development of student nurses and peers, there are instances where they fail to display the expected self-leadership attributes. The question that arose therefore was:

How can self-leadership within nurse educators be facilitated in nursing education institutions?

The study employed an exploratory, descriptive sequential mixed-method design to answer the above question. The study has three (3) phases. Phase 1 consists of two sub-phases. This poster presentation reports on Phase 1, sub-phase 1, the integrative literature review that explored and described the concept of self-leadership of nurse educators.

The question guiding the integrative literature review was:

What is the meaning of self-leadership within nurse educators in a nursing education institution?

The data was analysed utilising Miles and Huberman's method of data analysis. The themes that emerged from the integrative literature review were related to self-leadership benefits, lack of self-leadership awareness and self-leadership facilitative factors. The data obtained in this sub-phase will be integrated into the next two phases to eventually address the research questions of the study.