Campus Location

Dallas Campus (Online)

Date of Award

12-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Department

Organizational Leadership

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Lawrence Santiago

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Jaime Goff

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Cecelia Hegamin-Younger

Abstract

While the nurse leader plays an important and integral role in the success of healthcare organizations, the nurse leader pipeline has experienced a troubling and downward trajectory for several years. The lack of leadership aspiration among direct care nurses has been noted as one of several reasons for the downward trajectory. In addition, researchers identified the lack of understanding of perspectives of the various nurse leader roles and the lack of understanding of the effectiveness of experiential learning in the nurse leader role as potential contributions to the problem. The purpose of this quantitative, correlational research was to examine the relationship between developmental job experiences and leadership aspiration from the perspective of entry-level nurse leaders. The setting for the study was a multifacility healthcare system in North Texas. The Developmental Challenge Profile and Career Aspiration Scale were utilized to develop an online survey. A Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between job challenges and leadership aspiration. Multiple regression analysis was conducted to examine how job challenge components predicted leadership aspiration. Multiple regression analysis was also used to examine the moderating effect of age and race between job challenges and leadership aspiration. The data suggest a statistically significant, positive relationship between job challenge and leadership aspiration, with managing work group diversity identified as a positive predictor of leadership aspiration. In addition, the data suggest a statistically significant, negative correlation between age and leadership aspiration and a stronger relationship between job challenge and leadership aspiration among White participants compared to non-White participants. The research findings support the use of structured, experiential learning under the supervision of an experienced nurse leader for the entry-level nurse leader. The findings also provide several recommendations for nurse leadership practice, research, and education.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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