OBJECTIVE: To reveal the perceptions that members of the nursing staff of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) have about the leadership of the nurse manager of the unit, using the approach of the paradigm of complexity. METHODS: A qualitative study. Data collection occurred in a university hospital with a group of 11 professional nurses, in six meetings with focus groups, held in 2001. RESULTS: After the content analysis, categories emerged that link the tangle of relationships and interconnections in multiple dimensions. CONCLUSION: The nursing staff, and especially the nurse managers, need to recognize the complexity of the nursing role due to uncertainty, instability, insecurity, lack of logic, contradiction, ambiguity, change, randomness, and indetermination, which fights against order, objectivity, and certainty - in particular when multiple events discourage nurses and cause them to avoid the nurse manager.
Pediatric nursing; Intensive care units; Nursing, team; Nursing, supervisory