Impact of Leadership Styles on the Psychosocial wellbeing of healthcare workers: Narrative Review

Abstract

Currently, healthcare organizations apply diverse leadership styles and approaches towards managing the routine service delivery. Due to the many and diverse research observations regarding relationships between leadership styles and healthcare workers’ wellbeing in various studies, there is a need to conduct a narrative review towards a harmonized outcome. Accordingly, this article noted that transformational leadership, having the ability to inspire and motivate workers towards cohesion and engagement, have a strong significant contribution towards better psychosocial wellbeing among the healthcare workers. At the same time, this review noted that situational leadership, transactional leadership and servant leadership styles also have significant contributions on stress and burnout reduction among the health workers. However, Laissez-faire leadership style did not have a strong positive contribution in health workers’ psychological wellbeing, instead, it has been linked with instances of stress among the workers. Therefore, these observations stress the need for healthcare organizations to inculcate the transformational, democratic, situational and servant leadership styles.