Exploration of Student Nurses’ Voices Regarding Self-Leadership in Clinical Learning at the Limpopo College of Nursing, South Africa

BACKGROUND: Self-leadership is explained as a dynamic interaction of cognitive, behavioural and effective elements, geared towards self-influencing actions of an individual within the academic context. The purpose of this study was to determine the views of student nurses regarding self-leadership in clinical learning at the Limpopo College of nursing, South Africa OBJECTIVE: A non- probability, convenience, purposive sampling was used to select 16 students who voluntarily agreed to participate in this study. The researcher conducted semi-structured, one-to-one interviews which were audio recorded and transcribed. Data collection was done and analysed using the Tesch’s inductive, descriptive coding technique. RESULTS: One theme and its sub-themes emerged namely: self-leadership associated with responsibility and accountability, self-leadership viewed as a learned strategy, self-leadership - a difficult act to achieve, self-leadership is a beneficial process during clinical learning periods and self-leadership viewed as the adoption of personal values CONCLUSION: The findings of the study revealed that students shared the same views related to the enhancement of self-leadership in the clinical environment. In this regard, the various strategies were found to be used by students to support self-leadership learning.