As nursing education gets more complex, leadership styles employed in these nursing training institutions played a crucial role in achieving nurse educators’ job satisfaction. As such, this study intends to elicit attributes and practices of nursing academic leaders’ transformational and transactional leadership styles in enhancing the job satisfaction of nurse educators. The qualitative method used for the study was based on the phenomenological approach to gather an in-depth understanding of human behaviour through interview, documents and observations. Purposive sampling was undertaken in selecting nine nurse educators from three nursing colleges from Johor and Melaka. Data from the interview were summarized in answering nurse educators' job satisfaction and perceived leadership styles and practices of nursing academic leaders. The responses from the verbatim transcriptions were analysed using the software Atlas Ti. The strong relationship between nursing academic leadership styles and nurse educators’ job satisfaction suggested that the academic nursing transformational leadership style played a prominent role on subordinates’ job satisfaction and that nursing academic leaders’ transformational leadership practices and attributes had the ability to encourage subordinates to achieve more than what they planned. Transactional leadership practised by the nursing academic leaders indicated a weak link to subordinates’ job satisfaction as the leaders’ emphasis on payoffs for performance and corrective actions were not as acceptable to that of transformational leadership attributes practised by the leaders. The study uncovered effective leadership was enacted via engaging leadership where the leader enabled the development of an organization modelled by a culture of integrity, transparency, accessibility and genuine valuing of others and that their contributions were concerned for the development and well-being of others. In fact, moral attributes like integrity, trustworthiness and commitment to work as well as decision making styles of leaders such as being consultative leader are among the basic Islamic teachings on establishing worthy social order.
In Malaysia, breast cancer is the commonest cancer among women indicating that early diagnosis and screening practice is important to increase the survival rate. Breast self-examination (BSE), clinical breast examination (CBE) and mammography are the main screening practices for breast cancer. Knowledge and awareness of breast cancer can play an important role in aiding early detection of breast cancer. Little is known about the knowledge of breast cancer and screening practices among the non-academic staff in IIUM, Kuantan. As such this study aims to determine the knowledge and screening practices of breast cancer amongst the non-academic staff at the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Kuantan Campus. A cross-sectional study was conducted on 100 nonacademic staff from ten different departments in IIUM, Kuantan from March to April 2017. Data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire on knowledge of breast cancer and screening practices. The relationship between socio-demographic characteristics and knowledge of breast cancer and breast cancer screening practices were carried out using chi-square. No significance difference was found between knowledge of breast cancer and socio-demographic factors. However significant relationships were found between the age of respondents and BSE as well as the level of education of respondents and CBE. Most non-academic staff possessed an average level of knowledge on breast cancer and screening practices due to possibly ease of access to information. Low performance of breast screening practices was indicated possibly due to lack of awareness, misconception of the need and benefits derived from such screening practices.