Chaos Theory In Nursing Leadership

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Chaos Theory
Every leader has a leadership theory on which his or her leadership style is based. There are advantages and disadvantages to each theory. The effectiveness of each varies depends on how the leader uses the theory to guide his or her team to success. There are numerous theories that are being utilized in nursing leadership and management today. The most intriguing one for me is chaos theory. I believe that chaos theory is the most realistic for the operating room because it concedes that the manager is unable to accomplish every task at hand. The manager expresses the expectations of acceptable behavior and then allows the staff to freely assert themselves in various ways to achieve the goal (Huber, 2014).
Unlike other leadership …show more content…

Chaos theory suggests that simple systems consists of complex behavior, and complex systems may present simple behavior (Briggs & Peat, 1994). At the core of chaos is a delicate balance between forces of organization and disorganization (Briggs & Peat, 1994). It is difficult to accurately predict the course of events accurately, even with the simplest of systems. Two principles of chaos theory are randomness and complexity (Huber, 2014). Randomness is when you will not be able to predict the state at a future time, even if you knew everything about a system at a given time (Haigh, 2001). An example of this is a coin toss. Even if you could toss the coin an infinite amount of times and know the outcome every time, it would not help you predict the outcome of the next toss (Haigh, 2001). Complexity theory explains that long-term planning is not helpful, given such an unpredictable future (Sweeny & Griffith, 2002). The behavior of chaos systems may seem random, but it is created by complexity in the dynamic system, rather than the system itself (Sweeny & Griffith, 2002). It is paradoxical that even with the simplest of systems, it is still extremely difficult to accurately predict the course of events; yet, there is still some glimmer of order that appears spontaneously within that chaos (Huber, 2014). From chaos theory, we learn that order and change are not necessarily opposites …show more content…

However, chaos theory, in particular, teaches us to take care for the entire being including the physical, emotional, psychological, while trusting the natural unpredictability in health care setting. Chaos theory grants the individual the freedom to assert him or herself in a nondeterministic way (Huber, 2014). The leader’s responsibility is to understand and look for unknown dynamics of the system and then guide the organization toward an adaptive system (Haigh, 2001). The goal of chaos theory is for a department capable of engaging in cooperative behavior, using feedback to learn and adapt, organizing and operating with flexibility (Haigh,

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