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This chapter discusses leadership in healthcare. Effective leadership in a clinical setting is associated with a range of positive outcomes including better patient outcomes, fewer errors, more innovation, and lower stress among team members. However, clinicians face challenges when taking up leadership roles due to a general lack of enthusiasm for the task, a lack of training and support, and the problems of leading peers who are notoriously bad followers. Numerous theories and frameworks are available for understanding leadership. Transformational leadership and emotional intelligence are two of the most useful approaches to leadership and leadership development in healthcare.

This chapter examines leadership capabilities. These are the qualities (traits, skills, abilities, mindsets and behaviours) that are thought to distinguish ‘leaders’ from ‘followers’ and/or to contribute to successful or effective leadership. The chapter explores a variety of frameworks, from trait and style theory to behaviour theory and competency frameworks, and looks at this not only in terms of individuals but also of groups such as teams, boards and partnerships. The discussion explores in more depth recent interest in emotional intelligence and leadership with political awareness, before looking at the evidence about popular transformational and transactional leadership theory, and then post-transformational theory.

This book presents an approach to understanding personality structure and dynamics. Central to this approach is an attempt to examine a person's active coping style, even as this alone does not necessarily predict leadership potential successfully. It tries to probe and understand the whole person, not just what is inside, and not just what looks good on paper. The book has demonstrated how this method can add significant information in assessing executives who have already met the normal criteria for being considered for senior leadership roles. It has also described the four interrelated elements of the active coping style that are crucial to predicting effective leadership: integrity, psychological autonomy, integrative capacity, and catalytic coping. To illustrate and explain these elements and their interrelations, the book has provided examples of executives as well as well-known leaders from history.

This chapter discusses the power of active coping as a structural psychological construct for predicting effective leadership. When hiring executives, how do you know which candidates can meet challenges and resolve them productively, day after day, or constantly adapt to the unforeseen—and who must mobilize, coordinate, and direct others? When they all look good on paper, how do you make a choice? How do you get past the résumé to perceive the person and, most important, predict the performance? How could organizations avoid hiring charismatic yet ultimately value-destroying leaders like Jeff Kindler? These and other questions are addressed by active coping to help organizations avoid the adverse effects of poor leadership. The chapter describes the theory of active coping as it appears in everyday life, with particular emphasis on the four elements of the active coping style: integrity, psychological autonomy, integrative capacity, and catalytic coping. It also considers skills and traits associated with active coping, the different dimensions of personality, and the implications of active coping for assessing personality.

This chapter considers coping issues relating to women in leadership roles. Leadership requires a certain degree of self-confidence and aggressiveness. Women who do not display confidence and a certain degree of aggressiveness are less likely to be chosen as leaders because leaders need to be confident and aggressive. If, however, they do show a high level of self-confidence and aggressiveness, they are also not likely to be chosen because that is not how women are expected to act. Gender differences appear to play a crucial mediating role in shaping the judgments of particular male and female leaders. Women must be stronger copers to overcome bias based on gender stereotypes. This chapter discusses the results of a study that equate effective leadership in women with high self-esteem and high self-confidence as well as the communal style of leadership. In short, women must be stronger copers in order to transcend the constraints placed on their leadership style.

This chapter explains how active coping—or lack thereof—affects an executive's performance. All candidates for any role will have some flaws in their coping structure. An in-depth assessment helps the person making the assessment uncover and understand these coping flaws. Such information is crucial to making accurate predictions about leaders' long-term success. Knowing that they will flourish in one situation but wilt in another allows superiors—whether they are CEOs or presidents—to place leaders in positions that will play to their strengths and not their weaknesses. A large part of predicting effective leadership is identifying the conditions under which a leader will be effective. This chapter first considers the distinction between the concepts of effectiveness and success and how predictions about leaders reduce the risk of failures in leadership. It then discusses two complementary types of models—developmental and current state—used by psychologists to understand how and why humans behave in a specific way at a given stage of development. It also presents three stories that illustrate successful predictions of executive performance.

This chapter takes a look at the success story of a leader who was able to hone and strengthen his coping style. This executive makes a case for active coping as a developmental process, and his story illustrates each of the elements of active coping: integrity, psychological autonomy, integrative capacity, and catalytic coping. He has served as CFO of two Fortune 500 Companies, as CFO and partner at an international private equity firm, and on multiple boards. This chapter examines how active coping enabled this executive to achieve that success—beyond the fact that he is bright, charismatic, and forceful—and to deploy his psychological resources to become the highly sought after board member and investor that he currently is. His reflections demonstrate how active coping contributes to effective leadership; each of its four element is a style of functioning, an overall positive orientation to life that supports ongoing growth and adaptation and that all executives should emulate.

This book describes a depth-psychological approach to executive assessment based on psychoanalytic insights and how a psychological quality called “active coping” contributes to effective business leadership. Assuming a sustained motivation to lead others, it argues that it is the potential for “active coping” that is central to predicting effective leadership. Although traditional selection criteria based on past performance and achievements are indispensable, the book asserts that they do not adequately predict how a high-achieving person will handle new, unanticipated crises or, more generally, how anybody will perform in a new leadership role. The focus of depth-psychological analysis is on understanding the personality qualities of effective leaders, especially business executives, including their ability to act with consistently high integrity and to demonstrate sound, timely judgment when they occupy positions of power.

This chapter discusses the third element of active coping: integrative capacity. Leaders who possess integrative capacity are better able to assess problems and find workable solutions than those who do not. Integrative capacity is not only about perceiving and balancing inner and outer pressures, but also processing the incoming information to create an increasingly complex framework of understanding. The first requirement of integrative capacity is to perceive the world around you clearly, as well as the world inside of you. The second part is to tolerate what you observe without denial or a selective “pick-and-choose” outlook. The third part is to comprehend what you have observed: to see patterns, make connections, and absorb the information, integrating your perceptions into your mental structure. This chapter considers the role of integrative capacity as a significant determinant of effective leadership in executives. It argues that integrative capacity is a sign of mental health and illustrates intellectual empathy.

This chapter discusses the first element of active coping: integrity. Integrity has two definitions that are crucial to effective leadership. The first refers to moral character and honesty, the second to the state of being whole or undiminished. The two definitions are related. Integrity in both senses stems from a structure of values. A person cannot consistently act on those values if that structure of values contains holes. This chapter considers integrity as a moral quality as well as the relationship between integrity in that sense and integrity as implying wholeness of mind. It also looks at different definitions of moral integrity, with particular emphasis on transparency and commitment. Finally, it examines the empirical differences between higher-and lower-integrity executives with respect to personality structure and dynamics.

This chapter discusses the fourth and final element of active coping: catalytic coping. It is not enough for leaders to see the way forward; they must also blaze the trail and have the confidence to stay the course no matter what difficulties arise. They must have sustained power and drive to overcome obstacles and inspire their followers to move forward with them. Channeling this power and drive into constructive achievement rather than giving up is the definition of catalytic coping. Catalytic coping comprises both planning and the execution of the plan. It is creativity and activity in support of a goal. This chapter illustrates the power of catalytic coping by looking at the contrast between the military leadership of Ulysses S. Grant and George B. McClellan during the Civil War. It also provides an overview of catalytic coping as a crucial aspect of effective leadership in executives in the twenty-first century.