Active Leadership Can Promote Leadership Effectiveness in Healthcare Organizations

Background and Objectives: Healthcare organizations often fail to realize their strategic goals due to the lack of effective leadership. To address this efficiency, the potential factors influencing the management performance should be identified. Thus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate hospital managers’ leadership style and explore the relationship between leadership style in hospital executive managers and their leadership readiness and leadership effectiveness. Methods: The study sample included the entire (no. 96) C-level healthcare executives currently employed in Iran University of Medical Sciences, including chief executive officer (CEO), chief financial officer (CFO), chief human resource officer (CHRO), chief information officer (CIO), chief nursing officer (CNO), and chief operating officer (COO). The study instrument was a questionnaire asking about the respondents’ leadership style questions, leadership effectiveness and leadership readiness. The collected data were analyzed using Pearson’s correlation coefficient and single-variable and multi-variate regression. Findings: Transformational leadership was the dominant leadership style among the executive managers. Leadership readiness was revealed to be significantly correlated with transformational leadership (P < 0.05). Moreover, leadership effectiveness showed significant correlation with transformational/transactional leadership style (P < 0.05). Conclusions: Our study suggests that adopting active management, which represents both transformational and transactional managing style, can lead to improved leadership effectiveness in healthcare organizations.