The development of nurses as managers: the prevalence of the self-development route.

Aim: This article identifies ways in which hospital sisters and charge nurses (ward managers) are developed as managers in one London teaching hospital.

Context: Ward managers are practising in the context of increasing management responsibility in which decision-making is being driven to occur as close to the patient as possible. Decision-making about the management development opportunities for ward managers rests with senior nurse managers who have espoused their own preferences about the styles of management development open to ward managers.

Methods: For this small-scale exploratory-descriptive study, qualitative research methods were used with a postal self-completed questionnaire followed by a focus group. The target population was a group of 22 senior nurse managers. There was a questionnaire response rate of 68% (n = 15 respondents, four of whom participated in the focus group).

Findings: The research exposed and substantiated four styles of management development. The organizational prevalence of these styles and the ward managers' preference for each style were also ascertained. The most prevalent style was the one for which there was the least preference.

Conclusions: The findings indicated that there was a general mismatch between the style of management development prevalent in the organization and the style of management development preferred by the subjects. This left the ward managers generally to follow an unstructured self-development route. The use of a theoretical framework, expressed as a Reluctance-Readiness to Manage Continuum, is suggested to harness the propensity to self-develop and to link it with the organizational need to develop nurses as managers through the paradox of structuring self-development.