Implementing collective leadership in healthcare organisations
Intended for healthcare professionals
Evidence and practice    

Implementing collective leadership in healthcare organisations

Adele Nightingale Senior lecturer, healthcare leadership practice, School of Health Science, University of Central Lancashire, Lancashire, England

Why you should read this article
  • To refresh your knowledge of the various definitions and types of leadership

  • To familiarise yourself with the qualities and behaviours associated with collective leadership

  • To understand the benefits of implementing collective leadership in your healthcare organisation

Effective leadership is essential in healthcare organisations, with several high-profile reports on suboptimal care in the NHS demonstrating a link between ineffective leadership and compromised patient safety. Therefore, it is important that nurses understand how leadership is defined and what effective leadership entails in practice. Various types of leadership are described in the literature, such as transactional, transformational and contingency leadership. One approach that could be beneficial in NHS organisations is collective leadership, which involves developing a leadership culture where formal and informal leaders work together to generate actions. This article explores the implementation of collective leadership in healthcare organisations, the potential benefits of this approach, and the behaviours and qualities that nurses require to be collective leaders.

Nursing Standard. doi: 10.7748/ns.2020.e11448

Peer review

This article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and checked for plagiarism using automated software

@Deli_1102

Correspondence

anightingale@uclan.ac.uk

Conflict of interest

None declared

Nightingale A (2020) Implementing collective leadership in healthcare organisations. Nursing Standard. doi: 10.7748/ns.2020.e11448

Published online: 03 February 2020

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