Introduction: Any organization recognizes the significance of leadership and its crucial role in achieving their goals and success. In healthcare organizations, the complexity of the system and the difference in defining its success goals are reshaping the practice of leadership and its standards. According to House et al. (2002, p.5) a leader is able to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute to the success of the organization or task. Healthcare and business settings are different in terms of goals and system contexts. Healthcare organizations’ goals includes provide quality, value priced, safe health care services and ultimately, improve health outcomes. In addition to this primary goal, healthcare organizations also seek financial stability, community value, ethics and employee engagement. In this context, leaders are asked to efficiently use the available resources to optimize the managerial approaches to direct their teams towards more productive environment and positive interactions with patients. Healthcare setting-unlike business setting-is a more complicated system that consists of different professional teams and departments that usually don’t share the same objectives or planning strategies due to the diversity in the services provided. This …show more content…
The article – supported with other studies – state that evaluation of the programs is not an easy task owing to the complex and qualitative nature of leadership development programs (Hardacre et al., 2010). The paper reports the collected data that covered in average 1,600 people of healthcare staff - first line clinical managers to executive directors – during 13 years time span. The large population that was reviewed in a long-term duration added a strong trustworthiness to the author’s argument. In addition, the author backed his statements and analytic data with peer-reviewed