Understanding Self-Leadership in Nursing: A Descriptive Qualitative Study

To describe nurses' perceptions and to deepen the conceptual understanding of nurses' self-leadership in nursing.

A qualitative descriptive interview study.

Data were collected between December 2024 and February 2025 in one Finnish Wellbeing Services County through six online focus group interviews with a total of 17 nurses from diverse care settings. The interviews followed a structured thematic framework. The abductive analysis began with a deductive coding frame, which was iteratively refined through inductive interpretation. The resulting dimensions were further quantified by examining their frequency of occurrence.

All ten dimensions outlined in the theoretical framework were evident in the nurses' narratives of self-leadership. In addition, two new main dimensions were identified. Across nurses' accounts of self-leadership, the most frequently recurring dimensions were autonomous actions, collaboration, professional capability, time management, and balancing the workload.

Although theoretical self-leadership strategies can be identified in nursing practice, they do not fully capture the everyday, context-bound realities of the profession. In practice, nurses enact self-leadership through concrete, situationally embedded behaviours.

The normative orientation of self-leadership theory prescribes how individuals should regulate themselves to achieve optimal performance. However, prioritizing these prescribed strategies may narrow the analytical lens and obscure alternative conceptualizations of self-leadership. This study deepens the understanding of self-leadership in nursing by identifying its key dimensions as nurses themselves describe them and by contributing a new perspective to the existing theoretical framework. The findings emphasize that nurses' self-leadership is largely grounded in situationally embedded behaviours, which underscores the practical relevance of self-leadership for everyday nursing practice and its potential to support high-quality care.

The study was reported in accordance with the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research.

No patient or public involvement.