Transformational Leadership in Healthcare: Enhancing Practitioner Performance and Work Productivity through Effective Leadership Strategy

Research indicates that the primary reason why managers fail in handling work performance is due to ineffective leadership skills. In other words, creating a supportive healthcare environment for practitioners to meet the rising demands of today’s healthcare environment is crucial to the attainment of quality patient care in Africa and even globally. The transformation of the healthcare environment which involves the health centres available in the communities is crucial to this attainment in the African context where poor leadership management and lack of job satisfaction are often experienced as compared to the Western world and other parts of the globe.

This paper emphasises the need for the practice of transformational leadership in the healthcare sector to positively manage the work performance of health practitioners and improve the quality of care and safety of patients.

For this reason, the paper serves as a great contribution to the administrative management of the health sector in terms of progress and improvement, as well as seeking creative and innovative ideas, especially during times of health emergencies or drastic organisational change. The paper is based on literature reviews from several scholars of the transformational leadership theory, a positive relationship between transformational leadership and improved work performance was noted especially for healthcare practitioners in healthcare organisations. A structured literature review was conducted using electronic databases which included: DUT Data base, Website, Scopus and Google scholar. The structured literature review was employed to ascertain the relevance of the selected database, the scope of literature covered and keywords used for the literature search. The review identified six studies vital to the research questions. Extracted data were synthesized, summarised and correlated using narrative synthesis. Reviews indicated the influence of transformational leadership on improved work performance which involved job satisfaction, teamwork, intent to stay, job motivation, increased compliance to change, organisational culture, reduced work pressure and meeting the demands of patients. Also, the healthcare practitioners perceived a positive impression of the transformational leadership styles compared to other styles of leadership.

This paper suggests that healthcare leaders and clinical managers should consider a transformational leadership style to improve the work performance of healthcare practitioners as well as encourage job satisfaction, teamwork and work commitment.