LEAD 6021 Module 4 Leadership Identity Analysis Example

From the Nurse Who Was Put in Charge to the Director Who Shares It: Tracing a Leadership Identity Through Stage and Provisional-Self Research

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6021: Leadership Seminar

Module 4 Assignment

Instructor Name

November 2, 2026

Introduction

The first three modules of this seminar asked what the research says about leadership, how two colleagues lead and what leadership a hospital case required. This module turns the questions on me. I have been a staff nurse, a preceptor, a clinical educator and now a director of nursing professional development at a composite Michigan community hospital. This paper traces how my sense of myself as a leader formed across those roles, using two research models of leadership identity, and identifies where that identity is settled and where it is still being tried on.

Two Models of Leadership Identity

Komives et al. (2005) built a grounded theory of leadership identity from interviews with students who showed relational leadership and described six stages: awareness that leaders exist, exploration and engagement in groups, a leader-identified stage in which leadership means holding a position, a leadership-differentiated stage in which leadership is understood as a process that anyone in a group can practice, generativity, in which people take responsibility for developing others, and integration or synthesis, in which leadership becomes part of a stable sense of self. The key transition in their account is from the third stage to the fourth, from seeing leadership as a position to seeing it as a shared process.

Ibarra (1999), studying professionals moving into more senior roles, found that people adapt by observing role models to identify possible identities, experimenting with provisional selves and evaluating those experiments against their own standards and others' feedback. The first model describes the shape of a leadership identity's development; the second describes how people actually try new identities on.

Leader Identified: Charge Nurse at 27

I became a charge nurse on a medical unit two years after graduating, mostly because I was organized and willing. For the next five years, leadership meant the role. I made assignments, handled bed requests and called the house supervisor; when I was not in charge, I did not think of myself as leading. That is the leader-identified stage almost exactly: leadership belonged to whoever held the position, and the position was a set of tasks. I remember feeling slightly offended when a colleague who was not in charge organized the unit's response to a fall cluster, as though she had taken something that was mine. Looking back, the badge also protected me; as long as leadership meant the role, I never had to ask whether people followed me or only the schedule I posted.

The Shift: Precepting

The change began when I became a preceptor. A new graduate I was orienting, struggling with time management, eventually organized her own patient load better than I would have, and then began helping the next new nurse. I had no position over her and she had none over the next nurse, yet something like leadership was clearly moving between us. For the first time, I saw leadership as something that happened in a relationship rather than something attached to the charge nurse badge. That is the leadership-differentiated stage Komives et al. (2005) describe, and in my case it arrived not through a course but through watching someone I had taught become someone who taught.

Provisional Selves as a Clinical Educator

Moving into clinical education meant trying on identities I had not held before. The account Ibarra (1999) gave fits closely. I watched two role models, a demanding educator whose classes were famous and a quiet one whose new nurses stayed, and I experimented with both styles. For a year I lectured with energy and set high standards; my evaluations were good, but preceptors told me new nurses felt judged. I then tried the quieter approach, spending more time on units and less in the classroom, and preceptor feedback improved. Each experiment was evaluated against my own sense of what kind of educator I wanted to be and against what preceptors and new nurses told me. The identity I settled on came from that cycle, not from a decision made at the start.

What Others Granted

Neither model fully captures one feature of my path: other people had to accept each identity before it held. DeRue and Ashford (2010) described leadership identity as built socially, through people claiming leadership and others granting it, with each claim and grant reinforcing the identity over time. My first months as a clinical educator show the process clearly. I claimed the role with a lecture-heavy style, and preceptors, who did not see the classroom as where nurses learned, largely withheld their grant; they were polite but kept calling the unit's senior nurses with questions. When I moved onto the units and began solving problems alongside them, they started calling me. The identity I had claimed only became real when they granted it. That experience shapes how I now introduce new educators: I tell them that their title will get them a meeting, but that preceptors decide whether they are leaders.

Generativity: The Director's Role

As director, my job is now largely to develop other leaders: educators, preceptors and charge nurses. That corresponds to the generativity stage, in which people take responsibility for the development of others' leadership. The two educators compared in Module 2 and the charge nurses who invented the sepsis huddle in Module 3 are, in this light, not only colleagues to supervise but people whose leadership I am responsible for growing. Komives et al. (2005) note that people do not move through the stages in a straight line, and I recognize that: under pressure I sometimes slip back to the leader-identified view, treating decisions as mine because of my title.

Where My Identity Is Still Provisional

Two parts of my leadership identity remain experiments. The first is scholarship. I do not yet see myself as someone who generates knowledge, only as someone who uses it, and this doctoral program is in effect an extended experiment with a scholarly provisional self. The second is influence above my own department. With the chief nursing officer and other directors, I still behave as a capable implementer rather than as a leader who shapes hospital-wide decisions. The provisional-selves research suggests the path (Ibarra, 1999): find role models among directors who do shape those decisions, try small experiments, such as bringing a proposal rather than a report to the next council meeting, and evaluate the response.

What the Analysis Shows

Read through the stage model, my identity moved from position to process during precepting, and now centers on developing others. Read through the provisional-selves model, each move involved watching role models, experimenting and adjusting to feedback. Together they show that my leadership identity was built through relationships and trial, not through promotions alone. They also show its unfinished edges: scholarship and influence upward, the two places where I am still trying an identity on rather than living in it.

Conclusion

Tracing my leadership identity through two research models turned a career story into an argument. The charge nurse who felt robbed when a colleague led without the badge has become a director whose job is to grow leadership in others. The leadership philosophy this seminar asks for next will need to reflect that path, and to say honestly that parts of it are still being tried.

References

DeRue, D. S., & Ashford, S. J. (2010). Who will lead and who will follow? A social process of leadership identity construction in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 35(4), 627-647. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.35.4.zok627

Ibarra, H. (1999). Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), 764-791. https://doi.org/10.2307/2667055

Komives, S. R., Owen, J. E., Longerbeam, S. D., Mainella, F. C., & Osteen, L. (2005). Developing a leadership identity: A grounded theory. Journal of College Student Development, 46(6), 593-611. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2005.0061