Potential challenges facing distributed leadership in health care: evidence from the UK National Health Service.
- Authors
- Type
- Published Article
- Journal
- Sociology of health & illness
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2015
- Volume
- 37
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 14–29
- Identifiers
- DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.12171
- PMID: 25529349
- Source
- Medline
- Keywords
- Language
- English
- License
- Unknown
Abstract
The discourse of leaderism in health care has been a subject of much academic and practical debate. Recently, distributed leadership (DL) has been adopted as a key strand of policy in the UK National Health Service (NHS). However, there is some confusion over the meaning of DL and uncertainty over its application to clinical and non-clinical staff. This article examines the potential for DL in the NHS by drawing on qualitative data from three co-located health-care organisations that embraced DL as part of their organisational strategy. Recent theorising positions DL as a hybrid model combining focused and dispersed leadership; however, our data raise important challenges for policymakers and senior managers who are implementing such a leadership policy. We show that there are three distinct forms of disconnect and that these pose a significant problem for DL. However, we argue that instead of these disconnects posing a significant problem for the discourse of leaderism, they enable a fantasy of leadership that draws on and supports the discourse. © 2014 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness © 2014 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness/John Wiley & Sons Ltd.