رهبری خدمتکار و رضایت شغلی در حوزه های مراقبت های بهداشتی خصوصی Servant leadership and job satisfaction within private healthcare practices

Introduction and background Entering the healthcare profession is often viewed as a calling (Kilner and Kilner, 2004) and many consider the “traditional calling concept” as the ethical basis for the profession (Spencer et al., 1999). Some have a religious or spiritual calling to serve (Wheeler, 2011), whereas others simply have an intense desire to serve others (Northouse, 2011). According to Trastek et al. (2014, p. 372), “this desire to serve others is at the heart of the healthcare providers’ motivation”. Similarly, servant leaders perceive leadership as an act of service (Blanchard and Hodges, 2003); providing a service and serving others is at the heart of this leadership style (Jafai et al., 2016). Barbuto and Wheeler (2006) stressed that having a calling is central to servant leadership, where it refers to the desire to serve and sacrifice one’s selfinterests for the gain of others. Servant leadership is thus most effective in service-orientated organisations (Ekundayo, 2013), including healthcare. Servant leadership is well suited to leadership in healthcare because “health care providers’ work and their life calling is to serve” (Trastek et al., 2014, p. 380), and servant leaders are devoted to their service because of their calling (Wheeler, 2011). According to Schwartz and Tumblin (2002, p. 1426), the servant leadership model is necessary in healthcare organisations because such care “has an inherent servant nature”. Employee job satisfaction is as much a concern in the healthcare sector as it is in other business sectors (Rad and Yarmohammadian, 2006). Persistently low healthcare worker morale has been noted as a weakness in the management of healthcare in South Africa (Harrison, 2009). Alloubani et al. (2014) contended that the leadership style of a manager influences the job satisfaction of employees and several studies show this also to be the case in healthcare (Rad and Yarmohammadian, 2006). A study among professional nurses in South Africa revealed that those working in the public sector were generally dissatisfied, specifically with their pay, workload and available resources. Although nurses working in the private sector were generally satisfied, they were still dissatisfied with their pay and opportunities for career development (Pillay, 2009). Given that job satisfaction is an important part of ensuring high-quality healthcare and that dissatisfaction among healthcare workers leads to poor quality and less efficient service delivery (Pillay, 2009), the importance of addressing low levels of job satisfaction in the South African healthcare sector is highlighted. Leadership is a concept that has been widely studied (Cunha and Manuela, 2013; Reed et al., 2011), but little attention has been paid to leadership in healthcare (Nay et al., 2014; Parkin, 2009) and not much is known about how medical leaders lead (Chapman et al., 2014). According to Garber et al. (2009), servant leadership is particularly relevant to the healthcare context.