Shared leadership and group identification in healthcare: : The leadership beliefs of clinicians working in interprofessional teams

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Interprofessional Care on 28 February 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13561820.2017.1280005.Despite the proposed benefits of applying shared and distributed leadership models in healthcare, few studies have explored the leadership beliefs of clinicians and ascertained whether differences exist between professions. The current paper aims to address these gaps and additionally, examine whether clinicians’ leadership beliefs are associated with the strength of their professional and team identifications. An online survey was responded to by 229 healthcare workers from community interprofessional teams in mental health settings across the East of England. No differences emerged between professional groups in their leadership beliefs; all professions reported a high level of agreement with shared leadership. A positive association emerged between professional identification and shared leadership i.e. participants who expressed the strongest level of profession identification also reported the greatest agreement with shared leadership. The same association was demonstrated for team identification and shared leadership. The findings highlight the important link between group identification and leadership beliefs, suggesting that strategies that promote strong professional and team identifications in interprofessional teams are likely to be conducive to clinicians supporting principles of shared leadership. Future research is needed to strengthen this link and examine the leadership practices of healthcare workers.Peer reviewe

Training and habilitating developmentally disabled people : an introduction

211 p.; 22 cm

An ecological perspective on leadership theory, research, and practice

Current theories of leadership are based mainly on the industrial paradigm emphasizing the preeminence of positional leaders and the machine-like qualities of organizations. Evolutionary and attributional biases tend to reinforce the industrial paradigm. The authors propose an ecological theory of leadership that makes 4 important assertions: (a) Effective leadership processes involve temporary resolutions of a tension between the traditional industrial approach and the neglected ecological approach; (b) specific leaders are less important than they appear because the ecological context is more important than what leaders decide to do; (c) organizations are more adaptive when there is a diversity of genuine input into decision-making processes; and (d) leadership itself is an emergent process arising from the human interactions that make up the organization