NR 718 Week 3 Leadership Theory Analysis Example

Leading the Kilograms-Only Weight Change Through Kouzes and Posner's Five Practices, With Transformational Leadership as the Rival and a Section on Where the Fit Fails

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 718: Topics in Advanced Practice Leadership I

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Leading the Kilograms-Only Weight Change Through Kouzes and Posner's Five Practices, With Transformational Leadership as the Rival and a Section on Where the Fit Fails

The Change, Restated

The change is small and specific. Children arriving at a 26-bed community emergency department will go on scales that display kilograms alone, and triage will type the figure into a field that refuses pounds, all before a weight-based dose is ordered. An audit of 400 pediatric triage records found 57.0% measured in kilograms; the rest were converted by hand, stated by a parent or missing. The writer, the department's clinical nurse educator, has no authority over the 22 triage nurses, the biomedical engineering technicians who control the scales or the analysts who control the record field.

The Theory Chosen, and Why

The theory chosen is Kouzes and Posner's five practices of exemplary leadership, in which the leader sets the example, describes a shared future, questions existing routines, strengthens others and recognizes their contributions; the authors' own labels run from modeling the way to encouraging the heart (Kouzes & Posner, 2017). It is chosen for one reason above the others. It was built from leaders' own accounts of their personal best experiences at every level of organizations, not only from people at the top, so it describes leadership as a set of behaviors anyone can practice regardless of position. That is the situation here: a leader with influence and no formal power. The theory's measurement tool has also been tested across large samples with acceptable reliability (Posner, 2016), which means the self-assessment from the previous week can be linked directly to the analysis.

Applied Element by Element

Model the way. The theory asks the leader to clarify values and set the example. Applied here, the educator weighs every child personally on every shift worked at triage, in kilograms, and enters the weight in front of colleagues, especially when it is slow and inconvenient. The mechanism is visibility: nurses see the behavior done under the same pressure they face. Without authority, example is one of the few levers the educator holds.

Inspire a shared vision. The theory asks for a picture of the future others want to be part of. The educator's low score here makes this element the one to work hardest on. The picture offered to staff is concrete: a child weighed at the door, a dose that cannot be wrong by a factor of 2.2 and no more 2 a.m. calls from pharmacy asking whether a weight was in pounds.

Challenge the process. The theory asks leaders to search for opportunities and experiment. Here, the experiment is a one-week trial on day shifts with two locked scales, to measure how long kilogram weighing actually adds to triage before arguing about it.

Enable others to act. The theory asks leaders to foster collaboration and build others' strength. The night charge nurse and two triage nurses help design the triage workflow and the script for parents, and the biomedical technician is asked how to lock the scales rather than told to.

Encourage the heart. The theory asks leaders to recognize contributions and celebrate values. The day charge nurse, who runs the unit's recognition board, will post, each week of the first month, the names of nurses whose every child was weighed.

Where the Fit Fails

The theory fits less well in three places. First, it assumes the leader has followers who have chosen to follow; on this unit, the triage nurses have chosen nothing, and the most powerful influence on their behavior is a door-to-provider time posted every morning, which the five practices do not address. Second, the theory says little about structural tools. The most effective part of this change may be the locked scale and the kilogram-only field, which force the behavior regardless of anyone's inspiration, and the theory treats such tools only as part of challenging the process. Third, the theory's evidence comes largely from leaders' recollections of success, which favors stories of inspiration over the quieter work of negotiating a technology queue.

These misfits do not reject the theory. They show that it describes the human half of the change well and the system half poorly, and the project will need a change model and a safety framework to cover what it misses.

The Rival, Treated Fairly

Transformational leadership is the obvious rival. It describes leaders who raise followers' motivation through four behaviors: acting as a trusted model, communicating high expectations, encouraging new thinking and attending to each follower's needs, which Bass and Riggio group as four components, beginning with idealized influence (Bass & Riggio, 2006). It is not a strawman here. Its attention to individualized consideration would handle one part of this change better than Kouzes and Posner: the night charge nurse, whose trust the educator lost over a reference card, needs individual attention more than a shared vision. And its large research base links transformational behavior with staff commitment and performance.

It loses on fit, not on merit. Its four components describe a relationship between a leader and followers, and much of its evidence comes from formal leaders with direct reports. The educator has none, and the theory offers less guidance on influencing peers, technicians and analysts outside any reporting line. The five practices describe behaviors that do not depend on that relationship. A fair test is to imagine the first month led each way. Under a transformational approach, the educator would spend most of the month in one-to-one conversations, building each triage nurse's sense of purpose about pediatric safety and tailoring support to each person. That would likely deepen commitment among the nurses reached, but with 22 nurses across three shifts and no protected time, it would reach few of them before the scales were locked. Under the five practices, the month is spent working triage shifts, running the one-week trial and recruiting a co-leader, which reaches more people more quickly but more thinly. For a change whose hardest moment is the first week of locked scales, breadth matters more than depth, and the comparison favors the chosen theory for this change, not in general.

What the Analysis Changes

Applying the theory changes the plan in three ways. The educator will work triage shifts in the first month to model the behavior; the vision will be stated before data at every staff meeting; and the night charge nurse will be approached individually, borrowing the rival theory's strength, before any change to the scales is made, with that conversation held in person and in the first week.

References

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.

Posner, B. Z. (2016). Investigating the reliability and validity of the Leadership Practices Inventory. Administrative Sciences, 6(4), Article 17. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci6040017