Educational Attitudes Of Nursing Instructors And Their Perception Of Leader Behavior In Baccalaureate Nursing Students PDF Download

There are three avenues of education to prepare students for board examination leading to licensure as a registered nurse: diploma certificate, associate degree, and baccalaureate degree. The baccalaureate nursing programs are challenged to prepare students for acute care nursing, community health nursing and leadership in nursing. Baccalaureate nursing educators believe that their graduates will function as leaders, yet the review of literature revealed that nursing programs have not provided their graduates with the necessary knowledge and skills to fulfill a leadership role upon graduation. This study was undertaken to evaluate the effect a leadership/management course had on leadership knowledge and behavior of baccalaureate nursing students. Students in two upper division nursing courses comprised the student population for this study. The experimental group studied leadership/management concepts and were expected to identify and practice these skills while performing in a clinical practicum. The control group had an upper division theory class and a clinical practicum in general and psychiatric hospitals and community agencies, but there was no emphasis on leadership/management concepts. Employees in the health care facilities where the students practiced participated in the study by evaluating the leader behavior of the students. To obtain a measure of the participants' prior knowledge of leadership/ management concepts and to assess the degree of leader behavior, as perceived by followers, a Leadership Opinion Questionnaire and a Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire were administered at the beginning of the quarter. The two instruments used, Leadership Opinion Questionnaire and Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire, measured two important factors which previous research has identified as meaningful in a wide variety of leader-follower situations. These factors are consideration, which reflects the degree to which a leader shows job relationships with followers, and structure, which refers to task-related activities where the individual defines and structures roles toward goal attainment. These two functional dimensions are prominent in most leadership theories. Twelve hypotheses were concerned with leadership knowledge and behavior. Of the twelve hypotheses six were concerned with the student's opinion of how s/he would function in a leadership role, while six hypotheses were concerned with the follower's perception of the student's leader behavior. The Student's "t"--Test was used to test the six hypotheses that there would be no difference in the pretest scores of the experimental and control groups' leadership knowledge and behavior as measured by the test instruments. The Analysis of Variance was used to test the hypotheses that there would be no difference in the posttest mean scores of the experimental and control groups' leadership knowledge and behavior as measured by the same instruments. Based on the finding of this study, the Leadership /Management course had a positive effect on the students by producing a change in the experimental group's leader behavior. However, there was no significant change in the students' knowledge as measured by the Leadership Opinion Questionnaire. This should challenge each nurse educator to evaluate the leadership component of the nursing curriculum. It has been recently emphasized that baccalaureate nursing programs have not provided their graduates with needed knowledge and skills to fulfill a leadership role. Therefore it is imperative for baccalaureate educators to develop and evaluate management courses that will assist their students in gaining this knowledge and these skills to prepare them to fulfill the role expected of baccalaureate graduates.