The purpose of this research project was to examine whether frontline nurse managers who had attended a leadership program, perceived their leadership style as containing behaviors representative of transformational leadership. A secondary purpose was to determine the participant's opinions about the value of a leadership program for their practice. Current literature was utilized to support this research project examining a nursing systems issue.The primary instrument used to collect data about leader practice was the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) (University of Georgia, 2002). An evaluation tool was also designed and utilized to gather information about the participant's perception of their leadership behaviors after completion of a training program. Survey participants were selected from nurses who completed the Arizona Healthcare Leadership Academy (AzHCLA) (2007) course in the last four years.A course survey and results from the LPI revealed that study participants perceived an increase in their behaviors related to leading others as well as having learned new skills by having completed the AzHCLA course. Nurse's educational levels were compared to the five leadership practice subgroups from the LPI to examine whether a nurse's educational level could better account for an increase in leadership competencies. Research data revealed that no relationship between educational levels existed but that certain leadership skills were gained by having completed a leadership educational program. By using descriptive statistics, mean scores were used to identify differences in how nurses perceived their individual competencies and behaviors after having completed leadership education. Reported perceptions of competencies and behaviors indicated that educational programs can be beneficial to frontline nurse leaders.While results from an ANOVA showed there was no statistical significance related to education and LPI subgroups, there was a trend in the mean differences for those individuals with a master's degree. Qualitative data revealed that course participants perceived having gained new leadership skills and behaviors. The data from this study created a baseline of information that warrants further investigation to identify if indeed education makes a difference in perceived leadership practices.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between leaders’ self-awareness and their effectiveness. The population included leaders with at least five years of experience in a leadership role. Participants were recruited by snowball sampling methods; the researcher used a diverse network of professionals to recruit other leaders from diverse industries. Each leader completed a 35-survey questionnaire along with demographic questions (gender, education, years in leadership role, industry), and was required to ask at least four direct reports to complete the 35 questions about observed behaviors of their leader. After removing incomplete responses, the final sample included N = 179 leaders, each with at least four direct reports (N = 761). Data were collected using three well-established, validated research instruments for this quantitative correlational study: the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI) (Boyatzis, 2007), the Leadership Practices Inventory SELF (LPI-SELF) (Kouzes & Posner, 2013b) and the Leadership Practices Inventory OBSERVER (LPI-OBSERVER) (Kouzes & Posner, 2013a). LPI surveys provided five independent leadership competency scores: Modeling the Way, Inspiring a Shared Vision, Challenging the Process, Enabling Others to Act, and Encouraging the Heart (Kouzes & Posner, 2012). Qualtrics, an approved third-party online survey platform, was used to collect and analyze study questions. The study measured direction and strength of leaders’ LPI scores and self-awareness, the direction and strength of how the direct reports’ rated their leaders’ LPI practices and the leaders’ self-awareness; it also measured if there were significant differences in how the leaders rated themselves based on gender, education and time in a leadership position. The results indicated a positive, but not strong relationship between leaders’ own LPI scores and self-awareness. The relationship of the direct reports’ observation of leaders and their self-awareness appeared positive and strong for each of the five competencies. The correlation of the five LPI-SELF competencies and self-awareness to gender did not appear significantly different. Results appeared different in four of the five leadership practices based on education. Only Challenging the Process was similar for all educational levels. Whereas, years as a leader appear similar in four of the five leadership practices, and only Modeling the Way showed different results.