Introduction:

In Chile, nurses have legal support to manage care, a situation which facilitates the development of competencies to perform with autonomy and leadership; however, barriers still persist while moving towards a real acknowledgement of professional independency.

Objective:

To unveil the lived experience of nurses in executive roles regarding their own development towards leadership and professional autonomy.

Methodology:

This is a descriptive and interpretative qualitative study framed by the Edmund Husserl phenomenological approach. The sample by homogeneous case included three nurses in executive roles in health institutions in Valparaiso, Chile. The participation was by consent. An unstructured interview was used. For the discourse analysis, the Ken Wilber integral leadership model was followed.

Results:

Categories: Leadership awareness <being inquiring… intellectually>… Building Competencies <leadership is learned>. Moving towards the practice of autonomy and leadership, “positioning requires striving”. Weight of the organizational structures <your role is part of a hospital>. Interpretation: A practice of leadership and autonomy is based on attitude competencies over the cognitive and technical ones. Nevertheless, there still persist limitations to achieve a maximal expression of leadership and autonomy due to hegemonic institutional models which focus on medical decisions and neglect the integrated roles.

Conclusion:

The leader moves in a dual setting between a lower acknowledgement from the team, and a higher empowerment of the autonomous role and the visibility at the institutional directive level.