Abstract: Seeks to understand how clinical nurse managers build positive culture in their workplace, while identifying leadership attributes and actions for generating positive workplace culture. Interviews 10 clinical nurse managers from one secondary hospital in the North Island about their strategies to build positive workplace culture: preparation for their role; maintaining perspective, and intention to enhance collaborative behaviour.

Abstract: Describes and explores how nursing leadership practices occur in contemporary hospital wards in NZ. Utilises 18 months of episodic fieldwork observations in four wards of a hospital and individual discussions with nurses, to conduct a focussed ethnography from the perspective of leadership-as-practice. Uses qualitative analysis to identify the nature of leadership practices at all levels of the nursing team.

Abstract: The subject of nursing leadership is approached by reviewing the literature of two prominent nursing theorists, Patricia Benner and Jean Watson, and the literature of transformational leadership. Common themes are identified. An exhortation is offered to nurses to consider that the caring characteristics of nurses are what is required in the corporate world of management. Chapter 1, questions whether nursing and management are different worlds or shared realities. It outlines the author's experience of practising as a manager in a complex organisation and the seeming barriers that exist between managers and nurses and management and nursing. A questioning of those barriers became the impetus for the review. Chapter 2, outlines the work of Patricia Benner and Jean Watson. Caring is identified as a core concept which is said to differ significantly from a conventional understanding of helping and is inextricably linked to a profound understanding of what it means to be human. Chapter 3, reviews the literature of contemporary managers who are exploring a transformed approach to leadership and management. Six themes are identified that are common to nursing theory and transformational leadership theory. Chapter 4, acknowledges that despite the similarities between nursing and contemporary management thought, there remains a gap between nurses and management. Rather than feeling optimistic about the future, and confident in assuming leadership roles, many nurses feel defeated and fearful about the future. It is suggested that this may be a consequence of bad experience of leadership, of loss of joy of caring and of failure to value the strength residing in the collective community of nurses. Nurses are encouraged to recognise that their knowledge and experience of caring and wholeness, healing, sharing and enabling, are the attributes that equip them to be leaders of the future health and corporate world.