Intelligent, robust and courageous nursing leadership is essential in all areas of nursing, including mental health. However, in the nursing leadership literature, the theoretical discourse regarding how leaders recognise the need for action and make the choice to act with moral purpose is currently limited. Little has been written about the cognitions, capabilities and contextual factors that enable leader courage. In particular, the interplay between leader values and actions that are characterised as good or moral remains underexplored in the nursing leadership literature. In this article, through a discursive literature synthesis we seek to distill a more detailed understanding of leader moral courage; specifically, what factors contribute to leaders' ability to act with moral courage, what factors impede such action, and what factors do leaders need to foster within themselves and others to enable action that is driven by moral courage. From the analysis, we distilled a multi-level framework that identifies a range of individual characteristics and capabilities, and enabling contextual factors that underpin leader moral courage. The framework suggests leader moral courage is more complex than often posited in theories of leadership, as it comprises elements that shape moral thought and conduct. Given the complexity and challenges of nursing work, the framework for moral action derived from our analysis provides insight and suggestions for strengthening individual and group capacity to assist nurse leaders and mental health nurses to act with integrity and courage.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 08 August 2015.
All research outputs
#19,698,371
of 32,532,789 outputs
Outputs from Issues in Mental Health Nursing
#613
of 1,089 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#153,054
of 296,527 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Issues in Mental Health Nursing
#4
of 14 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 32,532,789 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 39th percentile – i.e., 39% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,089 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 9.0. This one is in the 43rd percentile – i.e., 43% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 14 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 64% of its contemporaries.
