Abstract
Nursing faculty are charged with the responsibility of being stewards of the profession by ensuring that today’s nursing graduates are cultivated to practice as competent, safe, and caring nurses of tomorrow, as well as to foster future nurse scientists, researchers, and educators. The profession of nursing is facing an ever-increasing shortage of nursing faculty as well as a registered nurse shortage, which in turn reinforces the urgency for increasing the number of qualified nursing faculty and faculty retention. An investigation of professional generosity among nursing faculty in academia may help to understand workplace nursing relationships within academia and offer insight into healthy nursing faculty relationships and promote faculty retention. Understanding the experience of professional generosity can add much value to the profession of nursing, particularly among nursing faculty within academia. The researcher of this qualitative study used a phenomenological method designed to illuminate the lived experience of professional generosity among nursing faculty in academia. Van Manen’s phenomenological research method of the six activities was used to examine the participants’ experiences, describe each experience as it appeared, and attempted to understand its interpreted meaning. Eight full-time, tenured nursing faculty members with an earned PhD, EdD, or nursing research doctorate were interviewed about their experiences of giving or receiving professional generosity or kindness while working in academia. The researcher analyzed the transcripts of the study participants’ interviews and found four essential themes that shed light on these nursing faculty’s experiences of professional generosity in academia: (1) I Feel Valued, (2) Core Relationships, (3) Reciprocity, and (4) Growing our Profession through Connectedness.