Power Nurses Can Use: Shared Governance, Magnet Recognition, and Who Decides How Nursing Is Practiced
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RN to BSN Program, Aspen University
N496: Nursing Leadership and Management
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Power Nurses Can Use: Shared Governance, Magnet Recognition, and Who Decides How Nursing Is Practiced
Power in health care organizations has traditionally flowed from the top: executives decide, managers implement, and staff nurses comply. Yet the people with the most knowledge about how nursing care works are often the nurses providing it. This paper examines two structures designed to give nurses legitimate power over their own practice, shared governance and Magnet recognition. It describes the sources of power involved, explains how each structure works, reviews evidence on their effects, and considers what they mean for a staff nurse.
Sources of Power
French and Raven (1959) described five bases of social power: legitimate power, derived from a formal position; reward power and coercive power, derived from the ability to give or withhold benefits and sanctions; expert power, derived from knowledge and skill; and referent power, derived from others' respect and identification. Staff nurses usually hold little legitimate, reward, or coercive power, but they hold considerable expert power, because they understand patients and workflows in detail, and often referent power among peers. The question for an organization is whether nurses' expert power is channeled into decisions or left to show up only as informal resistance to changes they were never consulted about.
Shared Governance
Shared governance is an organizational structure in which nurses share authority and accountability for decisions about their practice. Typically, unit practice councils made up mostly of staff nurses make or recommend decisions about clinical practice, quality, education, and professional development, while managers retain authority over budgets and operations. A hospital-level council coordinates across units, and a nurse from each unit council carries decisions upward and information back down. In effect, shared governance converts nurses' expert power into legitimate power over the areas they know best.
The evidence suggests that engagement in shared governance matters. A study of nurses in hospitals across several states found that engagement in shared governance varied widely, and that in hospitals with higher engagement, nurses were significantly less likely to report unfavorable job outcomes or poor ratings of quality and safety, and patients gave higher ratings on a national patient experience survey (Kutney-Lee et al., 2016). The finding is associational, but it is consistent with the idea that giving nurses a real voice improves both their work and patients' experience.
Magnet Recognition
The Magnet Recognition Program, administered by the American Nurses Credentialing Center, recognizes hospitals whose nursing organizations meet standards for nursing excellence, including transformational leadership, structural empowerment, exemplary professional practice, and the generation of new knowledge and improvements, all measured by empirical outcomes. Structural empowerment, one of the model's components, includes the kind of shared decision-making structures described above, so shared governance is usually part of the journey to Magnet recognition.
Magnet hospitals appear to deliver better outcomes. A study of surgical patients in Pennsylvania hospitals found that Magnet hospitals had better work environments and higher proportions of nurses with bachelor's degrees and specialty certification, and that patients in Magnet hospitals had 14 percent lower odds of death, after accounting for differences in patients and hospitals (McHugh et al., 2013). Much of that advantage was explained by the nursing factors themselves, which suggests that Magnet recognition marks, rather than magically creates, a strong nursing environment.
How These Structures Differ From Collective Bargaining
Shared governance is sometimes confused with unionization, but the two distribute power differently. A union gains power for nurses through collective bargaining over wages, benefits, staffing provisions, and working conditions, and its agreements are legally enforceable contracts negotiated between the union and the employer. Shared governance, by contrast, is created by the organization itself and gives nurses authority over clinical practice, quality, and professional development rather than over pay. The two can coexist: many unionized hospitals also have practice councils, and the subjects they address rarely overlap. The difference matters for a staff nurse deciding where to put effort. A concern about a staffing ratio may belong in a contract negotiation, while a concern about how handoffs are done belongs in a practice council.
What This Means for a Staff Nurse
For a staff nurse, these structures are an invitation that is easy to decline. Councils meet during or after long shifts, the work of revising a policy is slow, and some nurses doubt that managers will accept council decisions. Yet the alternative is to leave practice decisions to people who are further from the bedside. On a unit considering a change to its handoff process, for example, a council of staff nurses can pilot and refine the change before it becomes policy, which usually produces a better process and wider acceptance than one designed in an office.
A composite example shows how a council can work. On a medical unit, nurses complained for months that the handoff between day and night shifts ran long and still missed key information. The unit practice council, seven staff nurses and the clinical nurse educator, reviewed the literature on structured handoff, chose a bedside format with a one-page tool, and piloted it on half the unit for four weeks while tracking handoff time and missed items. The pilot showed shorter handoffs and fewer omissions, the council revised the tool based on night-shift feedback, and the manager approved it for the whole unit. Because staff nurses designed and tested the change, adoption was quick, and the few skeptics had been heard during the pilot rather than overruled after it.
Shared governance also has limits. It works only when managers genuinely share authority and when council members are given time to do the work. Where councils have responsibility without power, they can become a source of frustration rather than engagement. Nurses evaluating a potential employer can ask practical questions: how often councils meet, whether members are paid for council time, and which recent practice changes began in a council.
Conclusion
Nurses hold expert power whether organizations recognize it or not. Shared governance and Magnet recognition are structures that turn that expertise into legitimate authority over nursing practice, and the evidence associates them with better outcomes for nurses and patients. They depend on managers willing to share power and nurses willing to use it. For a staff nurse, participating in a unit council may be the most direct way to shape the conditions of their own work.
References
French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150-167). University of Michigan.
Kutney-Lee, A., Germack, H., Hatfield, L., Kelly, S., Maguire, P., Dierkes, A., Del Guidice, M., & Aiken, L. H. (2016). Nurse engagement in shared governance and patient and nurse outcomes. Journal of Nursing Administration, 46(11), 605-612. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNA.0000000000000412
McHugh, M. D., Kelly, L. A., Smith, H. L., Wu, E. S., Vanak, J. M., & Aiken, L. H. (2013). Lower mortality in Magnet hospitals. Medical Care, 51(5), 382-388. https://doi.org/10.1097/MLR.0b013e3182726cc5
How this N 496 Module 3 example is structured
N496 Module 3 typically asks for a paper of about 1,000 to 1,250 words on power in organizations, addressing either unions and collective bargaining or shared governance and Magnet recognition. Aspen revises courses, so follow your classroom's prompt. This example chooses the shared governance and Magnet option, grounds it in a classic theory of power, explains how each structure actually works, reports evidence with its limits and ends with what the structures mean for a staff nurse.
N496 Module 3 questions, answered
What does N496 Module 3 usually ask for?
Commonly a paper of 1,000 to 1,250 words on power in organizations that addresses either unions and collective bargaining or shared governance and Magnet accreditation. The module's discussion often asks you to describe your organization, the types of power at work and interdisciplinary relationships.
How does shared governance relate to Magnet?
Magnet's structural empowerment component calls for structures in which nurses take part in decisions about their practice, and shared governance councils are the most common way hospitals meet it. The sample explains that link and the evidence for each.
Should I write about unions or shared governance?
Choose the option you can connect to your own workplace or the literature most clearly. Both are about how nurses gain a voice. The sample takes shared governance and Magnet; a union paper would examine collective bargaining, staffing agreements and the legal framework for nurses' unions.
Write yours, or have the desk draft it
This paper is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official Aspen University document. Read it for the moves, then write your own to the instructions in your classroom. If you want one built to your exact prompt and rubric, the first custom sample is free and arrives in 24 to 48 hours.