Even when frontline nurses take informal leadership roles to enhance ethical practice,
their actions to build a moral community cannot be sustained if they are unsupported by their formal
nurse leaders. At the same time, we found that formal nurse leaders had difficulty supporting initiatives of
frontline nurses to enhance their ethical practice, and we began to question what limits their ability to do so
and what broader contextual influences might be shaping such difficulties. To clarify, in this article, we use
‘‘nurse leaders’’ as a broad term to indicate individual registered nurses in various leadership roles (manager,
administrator, charge nurse, supervisor, etc.) who provide support to frontline registered nurses. The
expectation for ethical leadership is that these individuals take responsibility to engage in ethical behavior
and provide leadership in building a moral community, that is, a workplace where values are made clear and
are shared, where these values direct ethical action, and where individuals feel safe to be heard.6
To find answers to this question, we sought to explore a series of questions including the following: