Welcome to Leadership in the Literature, a roundup of recent articles/multimedia on leading and managing from Allina Health Library Services

  1. The impact of transformational leadership style on nurses' job satisfaction: An integrative review. | Gebreheart - 2023 | Sage Open Nursing
    The argument about whether leadership style affects nurses’ job satisfaction is centered around the impact of different leadership styles on the work environment and the quality of care provided by nurses. Therefore, this review was primarily aimed at assessing the impact of transformational leadership style on the job satisfaction of hospital nurses.
     
  2. 'What matters to staff programme': Eight steps to improve staff well-being at work| Turner - 2025 | BMJ Lead
    The What Matters to Staff programme was designed at the Royal Free Hospital to address a key priority of improving workforce well-being. The initial aim was to set up a programme that responded to what mattered to staff and could be spread to 70 teams across the hospital within 2 years. Over the past 2 years, the programme has given staff the opportunity to have their voice heard and has supported leaders to ask, listen and do what matters most for their teams. This has led to improved workforce metrics and the programme being widely scaled and spread.
     
  3.  Leaders shouldn’t try to do it all | Lafley - 2025 | Harvard Business Review
    (Available in MN only, email library@allina.com for a copy outside of MN)
    The authors, a former CEO of Procter & Gamble and a former dean of the Rotman School, respectively, frequently find themselves sitting across the table from overwhelmed leaders. These executives are trying to improve or turn around an organization or the piece of it they head. They all face a long—and typically lengthening—list of important items on their to-do lists. They all understand that the job of a leader involves working intensely hard. But for many of them the current state feels like too much—and it's getting worse. The problem here is that whereas a company can always expand capacity to meet increasing demand, a leader's hours are constrained by nature: As the saying goes, there are only so many hours in a day. Many leaders think they can get more done if they simply work harder and longer. But in due course they tire, their overall productivity falls, and they risk burning themselves out and exiting. In this article the authors, drawing on their own experience and that of CEOs they have advised, explain how to escape that trap.
     
  4. Understanding what leaders can do to facilitate healthcare workers' feeling valued: Improving our knowledge of the strongest burnout mitigator| Stillman - 2024 | BMJ Lead
    Feeling valued is a striking mitigator of burnout yet how to facilitate healthcare workers (HCWs) feeling valued has not been adequately studied. This study discovered factors relating to HCWs feeling valued so leaders can mitigate burnout and retain their workforce.
     
  5. What is the impact of leaders with emotional intelligence on proxy performance metrics in 21st century healthcare? -A systematic literature review | Chaudry - 2024 | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
    To manage the employee experience, leaders must deeply understand employees' perceptions, feelings, and desires and respond thoughtfully. This is particularly crucial when immense resources are invested in gathering employee feedback through pulse surveys, town halls, and data scraping from internal communications. But leaders are often overwhelmed by the data and struggle to translate it into actionable insights. The authors conducted detailed interviews with executives and HR leaders from more than 20 multinational companies in sectors such as technology, financial services, and consumer goods. Their work reveals that although technology has simplified the collection of data, the real challenge lies in making sense of it and integrating it into a coherent strategy.
     
  6. Guidance for successful healthcare transformation: A systematic review of change management practices and outcomes | Hastings- 2025 | Australian Journal of Management
    The increasing pace of healthcare transformation places emphasis on how to enact it. However, there is a difference between healthcare commentators and policymakers regarding preferred change management practice; policy guidance is rooted in diagnostic practices, whereas  commentators suggest that dialogic is a more appropriate practice for ensuring success. What is missing from this debate is evidence to inform whether commentators’ suggestions will increase the likelihood of successful transformation outcomes. This study presents a systematic review of change management practices and outcomes, identifying 10 papers that report on 292 cases of transformation. It finds broad support that dialogic increases the likelihood of successful transformation, providing supporting evidence for updating healthcare policy and practice.
     
  7. How to marry process management and AI | Davenport- 2025 | Harvard Business Review 
    (Available in MN only, email library@allina.com for a copy outside of MN)
    Process management, which swept the business world in the 1990s and then fell out of favor, is experiencing a renaissance, thanks to AI. The two reinforce each other: AI helps firms significantly scale up improved processes, and well-managed processes make it easier to obtain the high-quality data needed to train AI. Combining them can generate huge productivity gains—but it requires a lot of change management. In this article the authors outline seven steps companies can follow to bring together people, data, analytics, and technology—in particular, AI—to revamp processes and achieve increasingly higher business performance
     

Multimedia

  1. Leading from within: Cultivating effective leadership and followership in health care | 2025 | NEJM Catalyst (article with audio)
    This discussion highlights the importance of recognizing that everyone can engage in leading within their roles, while also addressing the crucial skills of followership and the need for clarity in leadership roles to foster effective teamwork and improve patient outcomes.

  2. Addressing mental health disparities among racial and ethnic minorities | 2024 |American Hospital Association - Advancing Health (podcast)
    We humans are a social species, and so it’s not surprising that we care a lot about what other people think of us. It’s also not surprising that many of us stumble when we try to manage others’ views of us. This week, organizational psychologist Alison Fragale explains why that is, and offers better ways to win friends and influence people.