Shared leadership in Finnish social and health care

Abstract

PurposeThe background reports covering the ongoing reforms in Finnish social service and health care noted that people managing in this field were presented with certain challenges. These included such human resource management challenges as support for the implementation of new work practices, employee commitment, motivation and maintaining wellbeing at work. The purpose of this paper, as part of investigating some of these human resource challenges, is to investigate the occurrence of shared leadership among middle‐level managers in social service and health care, based on self‐evaluations of the managers' own leadership.Design/methodology/approachQuestionnaires were sent to 703 middle‐level managers (managers above first‐line management level) in social service and health care in municipalities and municipal federations within the area of responsibility of a university hospital. There were 433 responses indicating a response rate of 62 per cent. The data from the questionnaires were assessed using quantitative methods in the form of distributions, cross‐tabulations and regression analysis.FindingsShared leadership was mainly practised by those female managers without a medical doctor's professional background in large organizations of primary health care and social service administration. There was no connection between a manager's age and work experience and the occurrence of shared leadership practices.Research limitations/implicationsAs evaluated by middle‐level managers, the social service and health care organizations under survey contained the seeds of change, ranging from individual leadership to shared leadership. Such change may promote innovation, work motivation and the readiness for development among employees.Originality/valueThis study explored the little researched phenomenon of shared leadership and its occurrence among middle‐level managers in Finnish social and health care.

Workplace Integration: Key Considerations for Internationally Educated Nurses and Employers

“…Under the broad topic of equitable practices for managing the workforce, nurse managers would benefit from different perspectives on harnessing the talents of a diverse team. Aside from key functions of employee engagement, performance appraisals and access to organizational networks (Manning 2012), understanding cultural dimensions in leadership styles (House et al 2002;Konu and Viitanen 2008) may also be relevant for nurse managers at the case organization. Some organizations have gone further and instituted accountability measures by expecting nurse managers to have the core competency of supporting IENs effectively (Romaniuk 2015).…”

Career anchors of dentist leaders

“…Even though much leadership research has been undertaken in the nursing and medical professions [e.g. [1][2][3][4][5] there are only a few studies focusing on dentist leaders or leadership in dentistry [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Even fewer studies deal with factors influencing on dentist leaders´ career decisions [6,10,14].…”

Vertical and Shared Leadership as Predictors of Team Effectiveness: Insights from Healthcare Sector in a Developing Country

“…Regarding the healthcare organizations, many authors (i.e. Spooner et al, 1997;Merkens & Spencer, 1998;Scott & Caress, 2005;Steinert et al, 2006;Konu & Viitanen, 2008) highlighted that shared leadership could be seen as a pathway to creating uniformity in decision-making and defining responsibilities as a means to improve outcomes. If it is clear, it is important to reflect also on the nature of teamwork in healthcare.…”

“…Leadership is a process, not a position (Parry, 1999). It is usually analyzed within psychological perspective as: a process of psychological (Pucic, 2011(Pucic, , 2015 and social (Parry, 1998; Studies about shared leadership in healthcare have already been performed previously (Nielsen et al, 2009;Jackson, 2000;Konu & Viitanen, 2008;Merkens & Spencer, 1998;Spooner et al, 1997;Steinert et al, 2006). We cannot state the same for studies about vertical leadership, or even less for studies combining both vertical and shared leadership in healthcare.…”