| Course | NUR 5043 Nursing Leadership: Organizational Systems |
|---|---|
| Module | Module 2 |
| Paper type | Leadership theory comparison |
| Length | 1,230 words, about 4 pages plus title and reference pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | American College of Education |
| Program | MSN |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for NUR 5043 Module 2
Three Theories and a Problem Nobody Owns: Transformational, Servant and Complexity Leadership Applied to a Delay That Crosses Five Departments
Student Name
American College of Education
NUR5043: Nursing Leadership: Organizational Systems
Module 2 Assignment
Instructor Name
October 19, 2026
The Problem the Theories Must Answer
In the composite 190-bed community hospital described in the previous module, a bedside nurse who decides that a patient needs a pressure-redistribution mattress waits a median of 19 hours for one. The delay has three sources that sit in three different reporting lines: an approval rule written by system finance, an approval step that depends on one wound nurse who works weekdays, and a vendor contract that measures delivery from the moment an order is placed. Meanwhile the unit rate of stage 2 and deeper hospital-acquired pressure injuries has risen. The leader in this paper is the director of medical-surgical nursing, who owns five units, the staff who feel the delay, and none of the rules that cause it.
That last fact is the test for each theory. A theory of leadership earns its place in this analysis only if it tells the director what to do when authority stops at her own department's edge. The director's position is common for middle managers in nursing. She is accountable for the outcome, since pressure injury rates appear on her units' quality dashboards, but the levers that would change the outcome belong to people who do not report to her and who are measured on different things. Each theory below is therefore asked the same two questions: what would a director who followed it do first, and would that action reach the rule, the role or the contract that produces the delay?
Transformational Leadership
Burns (1978) held that leadership becomes transforming when leader and followers lift each other toward greater motivation and a larger sense of moral purpose than either begins with. Bass and Riggio (2006) later gave the idea four components: a leader who is trusted and admired (idealized influence), who offers a compelling picture of the future (inspirational motivation), who invites people to question assumptions (intellectual stimulation), and who attends to what each person needs to grow (individualized consideration). A transformational leader changes what people want, not only what they do, and the theory's strongest evidence comes from studies of followers' commitment and satisfaction.
A transformational director would start with her own staff. She would make pressure injury prevention a shared purpose on all five units, tell the story of one patient whose injury followed a weekend wait, and invite nurses to challenge the assumption that the delay is out of their hands. Intellectual stimulation might produce useful ideas, such as a unit list of patients awaiting surfaces handed off at every shift. What the theory does not supply is a way to change rules owned by finance and supply chain. Its influence runs mainly through followers, and the people who wrote the approval rule are not the director's followers. Transformational leadership would give the director an energized staff and the same 19-hour delay.
Servant Leadership
Greenleaf (1977) proposed that the leader is servant first: the test of leadership is whether those served grow healthier, wiser and more able, and whether the least privileged are helped or at least not harmed. A servant leader asks what the people doing the work need and removes what stands in their way.
Applied here, servant leadership points the director toward the barriers her nurses face every night. She might arrange for the house supervisor to approve surfaces when the wound nurse is off, carry equipment requests up the chain herself, and protect nurses from blame when an injury follows a delay they reported. That is more useful than inspiration because it acts on the process. The theory's limit is scale. Removing obstacles for one's own staff is different from redesigning a process that five departments share, and servant leadership says little about how to persuade peers and superiors who have their own legitimate goals, such as a finance officer who was asked to cut rental spending and did so.
Complexity Leadership
Uhl-Bien et al. (2007) argued that leadership in knowledge-era organizations cannot be located only in individuals at the top. Their complexity leadership theory describes three functions: administrative leadership, which runs the formal hierarchy; adaptive leadership, which is the emergent, collective process by which new solutions arise from interaction among people with different information; and enabling leadership, which sets up the conditions in which adaptive work can happen and then carries what it produces into the hierarchy so that it can be adopted.
This theory describes the hospital's problem almost exactly. No single person can fix the delay because the relevant knowledge is spread across finance, supply chain, the vendor, wound care and the units, and no one has convened those people. An enabling leader would not try to own the solution. The director would bring together a small group from each department, give it both the rental spending report and the pressure injury data that each side has never seen together, and ask it to redesign the process. Her formal authority would be used to protect the group's time and to carry its proposal to the executives who can change the rule. The director cannot command a fix, but she can create the one meeting where the fix is likely to be found.
What the Evidence Says About Outcomes
Theory choice should also answer to evidence. Cummings et al. (2018) screened 50,941 titles and kept 129 quantitative studies that related how nurses are led to results for the nurses themselves and for their workplaces. The pattern they reported was consistent: across many settings, staff whose leaders built relationships reported more satisfaction and commitment than staff whose leaders attended mainly to tasks, and 52 studies linked relational styles to higher nurse job satisfaction while 16 linked task-focused styles to lower satisfaction. Leadership focused only on getting tasks done was insufficient.
That evidence supports the relational core that all three theories share, but it does not settle this case. The review measured outcomes for nurses and work environments, largely within units, and complexity leadership has a thinner outcome literature because its unit of analysis is the network rather than the leader. The choice here therefore rests on fit with the problem more than on comparative effect sizes, and the paper should say so rather than claim more certainty than the research gives.
The Choice and When It Would Be Wrong
Complexity leadership is the best fit for this problem, with a transformational and servant manner in how the director works with her own staff. The problem is interdependent, the knowledge needed is spread across departments, and the director's formal authority is limited, which are the conditions that theory was built for. Transformational leadership alone would motivate people who cannot change the rule, and servant leadership alone would produce workarounds that leave the rule in place.
The choice would be wrong under different conditions. If the hospital faced an immediate cluster of full-thickness injuries, a slow collective process would be the wrong first move, and the director should use administrative authority at once, for example by asking the chief nursing officer to suspend the approval rule for patients meeting defined criteria while the group works. Complexity leadership is also only as good as the enabling leader's follow-through. A convened group whose proposal is never carried to decision makers teaches staff that participation is a ritual, and that lesson is hard to undo.
References
Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. Harper & Row.
Cummings, G. G., Tate, K., Lee, S., Wong, C. A., Paananen, T., Micaroni, S. P. M., & Chatterjee, G. E. (2018). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 85, 19-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2018.04.016
Greenleaf, R. K. (1977). Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. Paulist Press.
Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298-318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.04.002
The NUR 5043 Module 2 assignment instructions
In NUR 5043, Module 2 often asks you to compare leadership theories and apply them to an organizational problem. Most prompts expect each theory explained from its primary sources, an analysis of how it would guide a leader in a specific situation, research evidence on leadership and outcomes, and a justified choice. Some sections specify which theories to compare; others let you choose two or three. Most comparisons run near five pages. Canvas notes whether the problem must continue from Module 1 and whether a recommendation is required or the comparison alone is enough.
How the NUR 5043 Module 2 example is put together
The paper restates the problem in a few sentences, with its three causes and the director's lack of authority over finance and supply, which gives every theory the same test. The transformational section draws on its originators and predicts concrete actions, naming what the theory does well before where it stops. The servant leadership section shows different actions in the same case, including a practical workaround, and recognizes that finance acted for a legitimate reason. The complexity section maps administrative, adaptive and enabling functions onto the case. An evidence section reports the review's findings and its limits for this problem, and the final section makes the choice, blends the others in and states its failure conditions.
NUR 5043 Module 2 rubric: what full marks look like
A theory comparison earns its marks through five rows: explaining each theory accurately, applying it to the delay, using evidence, recommending and writing. Explanation marks require primary sources. Application carries the most weight in most versions, rewarding predicted actions that differ between theories in the same case. Evidence points go to research on leadership outcomes reported with its limits. Recommendation marks reward a clear choice with reasons and conditions under which it fails. APA 7 and a graduate register take the last points. The Cummings review should be reported with its size and its counts and then limited for this case, since it measured staff outcomes more than cross-department problems. Recognizing that finance acted for a legitimate reason also earns credit for fairness, which graders weigh in a leadership course.
Common NUR 5043 Module 2 mistakes, and how to avoid them
Comparison papers most often describe each theory in turn and conclude that all are useful. Another frequent weakness is applying theories so generally that they produce the same actions. Students also cite research that measured staff satisfaction as proof that a style improves patient outcomes. Give each theory the same concrete test. Show what each would have the leader do differently. Choose one and say when it would be wrong. If your problem involves staffing, retention or a merger, the desk can write a comparison on that problem. Keep the problem the same for all three theories so the comparison is fair.
Write yours, or have the desk draft it
This paper is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official American College of Education document. Read it for the moves, then write your own to the instructions in your classroom. If you want one built to your exact prompt and rubric, the first custom sample is free and arrives in 24 to 48 hours.
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NUR 5043 Module 2 questions, answered
Is it acceptable to recommend a blend of theories?
Yes, if you choose one as the primary lens and explain what the others add. A paper that says every theory is useful without choosing reads as a summary. Name the theory that fits the problem's structure and use the others for specific behaviors.
Do I need research evidence as well as theory sources?
Most graduate rubrics expect both: primary sources for each theory and at least one study or review on leadership outcomes. Report what the research measured and where its findings stop, rather than using it to claim more than it shows.
Where can I find a free NUR 5043 Module 2 sample paper?
The three-theory comparison on a cross-department delay is free here, with each theory applied, the outcome evidence, the choice and its limits, plus six references and section notes.
What is complexity leadership theory?
It treats organizations as complex adaptive systems and describes three leadership functions: administrative, adaptive and enabling. It suits problems that cross boundaries where no single leader has authority, because it focuses on creating conditions for people to solve them together.
Which leadership theory is best for nurse managers?
No single theory is best for every problem. Relational styles such as transformational leadership are linked to better staff outcomes, but problems that cross departments may need complexity thinking. Match the theory to the structure of the problem.