An exploration of leadership of registered nurses in clinical settings

Nurses provide leadership at various levels throughout healthcare organisations as Directors of Nursing, Chief Nursing Officers, as well as clinical leaders at a unit level. Existing research into nursing leadership has mainly focussed on transformational and transactional forms of leadership, which has been at the expense of exploring more contemporary forms of leadership. Furthermore there is limited research into the experiences of leadership from registered nurses working in the clinical settings. This research explored the extent and appropriateness of four forms of leadership namely transactional, transformational, distributed and hybrid leadership as it applies in to clinical nursing.