Review of leadership styles: An exploration of approaches used by hospital administrators: A systematic review of literature

Healthcare leadership in medical institutions is the foundation of organizational success levels, which appear to have a direct effect on patient safety, staff motivation, and performance. As the primary decision-makers in such systems, hospital administrators should lead different teams and harmonise clinical, financial, and operational goals. Their decision-making processes typically influence the effectiveness of service delivery, long-term resilience, and care culture in hospitals. Although the importance of leadership in healthcare has been recognised, academic attention has been fully directed in the area of leadership in nursing and in clinical leadership with a massive gap in the research on the specialised methods by which the administrators of hospitals apply the same. 

This study fills this gap by carrying out a systematic review of leadership styles employed in the management of a hospital. This review compares eight major approaches: transformational, transactional, democratic, autocratic, laisser-faire, servant, adaptive, and distributed leadership, discusses the principles, strengths, and weaknesses of each style, and how each approach is most appropriate in a dynamic hospital setting. These results show that hospital leaders should also be flexible and merge their leadership approaches based solely on multiple leadership models, instead of looking at a single model. By integrating different ideas, this review provides practical recommendations that can be used to inform leadership training, policymaking, and medical management practices to promote both institutional and patient-centred care.