BackgroundLeadership by point-of-care and senior managers is increasingly recognized as critical to the acceptance and use of research evidence in practice. The purpose of this systematic review was to identify the leadership behaviours of managers that are associated with research use by clinical staff in nursing and allied health professionals.MethodsA mixed methods systematic review was performed. Eight electronic bibliographic databases were searched. Studies examining the association between leadership behaviours and nurses and allied health professionals’ use of research were eligible for inclusion. Studies were excluded if leadership could not be clearly attributed to someone in a management position. Two reviewers independently screened abstracts, reviewed full-text articles, extracted data and performed quality assessments. Narrative synthesis was conducted.ResultsThe search yielded 7019 unique titles and abstracts after duplicates were removed. Three hundred five full-text articles were reviewed, and 31 studies reported in 34 articles were included. Methods used were qualitative (n = 19), cross-sectional survey (n = 9), and mixed methods (n = 3). All studies included nurses, and six also included allied health professionals. Twelve leadership behaviours were extracted from the data for point-of-care managers and ten for senior managers. Findings indicated that managers performed a diverse range of leadership behaviours that encompassed change-oriented, relation-oriented and task-oriented behaviours. The most commonly described behavior was support for the change, which involved demonstrating conceptual and operational commitment to research-based practices.ConclusionsThis systematic review adds to the growing body of evidence that indicates that manager-staff dyads are influential in translating research evidence into action. Findings also reveal that leadership for research use involves change and task-oriented behaviours that influence the environmental milieu and the organisational infrastructure that supports clinical care. While findings explain how managers enact leadership for research use, we now require robust methodological studies to determine which behaviours are effective in enabling research use with nurses and allied health professionals for high-quality evidence-based care.Trial registrationPROSPERO CRD42014007660Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13012-018-0817-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

As you seek to imagine or reimagine solutions to the greatest problems of our time, harness the power of partnership… the power of those partnerships to bridge what seem like different worlds.~P aul Farmer.Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies needed to ensure an inclusive and equitable future for all. Browne and Reimer-Kirkham (2014) examined the disjunctures

By examining an exemplar sample of mental health nursing educational policies and related legislation, in this article, we trace the discursive production of madness as an “othered” identity category. We engage in a critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education in Canada, drawing on provincial and federal policies and legislation as the main sources of data. Theoretically framed by critical posthumanism and mad studies, this article outlines how the mad subjectivity becomes decontextualized out of its identity‐based understanding and recontextualized as an inferior category of “the human,” circulating within discourses of pedagogy, economics, law, and psychiatry. The article maps the intertextual nexus of the discourse of mental health nursing education, making visible the complex, the arbitrary, and the sometimes‐contradictory nature of the discipline's grappling with identity‐based mental health concepts. We close with several implications for nursing policy, education, and practice.

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