Strong management and leadership competencies have been identified as critical in enhancing health system performance. While the need for strong health system leadership has been raised, an important undertaking for health policy and systems researchers is to generate lessons about how to support leadership development (LD), particularly within the crisis-prone, resource poor contexts that are characteristic of Low- and Middle-Income health systems. As part of the broader DIALHS (District Innovation and Action Learning for Health Systems Development) collaboration, this article reflects on 5 years of action learning and engagement around leadership and LD within primary healthcare (PHC) services. Working in one sub-district in Cape Town, we co-created LD processes with managers from nine PHC facilities and with the six members of the sub-district management team. Within this article, we seek to provide insights into how leadership is currently practiced and to highlight lessons about whether and how our approach to LD enabled a strengthening of leadership within this setting. Findings suggest that the sub-district is located within a hierarchical governance context, with performance monitored through the use of multiple accountability mechanisms including standard operating procedures, facility audits and target setting processes. This context presents an important constraint to the development of a more distributed, relational leadership. While our data suggest that gains in leadership were emerging, our experience is of a system struggling to shift from a hierarchical to a more relational understanding of how to enable improvements in performance, and to implement these changes in practice.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there is a relationship between emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness among senior leaders in a South African financial services organisation. The sample consisted of 973 participants. A convenience sample was used because the leaders were part of a strategic organisational initiative that included the completion of the measurement instruments used for the current study. The participants completed the Bar-On EQ-i, a measure of emotional intelligence, and the leadership effectiveness data were obtained from an organisation specific Multi-rater that accessed self-ratings, peer and subordinate ratings, as well as manager ratings in terms of leadership behaviours linked to organisational worldviews of leadership effectiveness. Partially due to the large sample size, the results showed that there were statistically significant correlations between emotional intelligence and the leadership variables as measured for the leaders, but the prediction value between these variables was not practically significant.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there is a relationship between emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness among senior leaders in a South African financial services organisation. The sample consisted of 973 participants. A convenience sample was used because the leaders were part of a strategic organisational initiative that included the completion of the measurement instruments used for the current study. The participants completed the Bar-On EQ-i, a measure of emotional intelligence, and the leadership effectiveness data were obtained from an organisation specific Multi-rater that accessed self-ratings, peer and subordinate ratings, as well as manager ratings in terms of leadership behaviours linked to organisational worldviews of leadership effectiveness. Partially due to the large sample size, the results showed that there were statistically significant correlations between emotional intelligence and the leadership variables as measured for the leaders, but the prediction value between these variables was not practically significant.