Leadership set-up: wishful thinking or reality?

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of the study is to determine whether one leader set-up is better than the others according to interdisciplinary cooperation and leader legitimacy. Design/methodology/approach The study is a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews at three Danish hospitals. Findings The study found that the leadership set-up did not have any clear influence on interdisciplinary cooperation, as all wards had a high degree of interdisciplinary cooperation independent of which leadership set-up they had. Instead, the authors found a relation between leadership set-up and leader legitimacy. In cases where staff only referred to a leader from their own profession, that leader had legitimacy within the staff group. When there were two leaders from different professions, they only had legitimacy within the staff group from their own profession. Furthermore, clinical specialty also could influence legitimacy. Originality/value The study shows that leadership set-up is not the predominant factor that creates interdisciplinary cooperation; but rather, leader legitimacy also should be considered. Additionally, the study shows that leader legitimacy can be difficult to establish and that it cannot be taken for granted. This is something chief executive officers should bear in mind when they plan and implement new leadership structures. Therefore, it would also be useful to look more closely at how to achieve legitimacy in cases where the leader is from a different profession to the staff.

Fifty-five years of managerial shared leadership research: A review of an empirical field

“…Most papers studied cases in which the sharing managers were equals in the organisational hierarchy (Ebbers and Wijnberg, 2017; Krause et al, 2015). Six papers (Aravena and Quiroga, 2019; Choi et al, 2012; Flessa, 2014; Gronn, 1999; Johne and Harborne, 2003; Vine et al, 2008) studied non-equal sharing and eleven papers studied sharing cases of both equals and non-equals (Thude et al, 2018) (see Figure 6). For four papers, the information about formal equality was either missing or not relevant.

Figure 6.Number of papers focussing on formally equal or non-equal managerial sharing (63 papers).

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