Yi-Lin Zhang,1 Yan-Ping Wang,1 Tao Sun,2 Yi-Nan Tian,1 Xia-Xia Qin,1 Xin-Yu Duan,1 Yu-Tian Gan,1 Guan-Jun Wang,1 Li-Bin Yang,1,* Shu-E Zhang1,* 

1Department of Health Management, School of Health Management, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China

*These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence: Li-Bin Yang; Shu-E Zhang, Department of Health Management, School of Health Management, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, People’s Republic of China, Email yanglib@126.com; hydzhangshue@163.com

Purpose: Transformational leadership among core hospital leaders boosts medical organizations’ competitiveness, adaptability, and sustainability, which is jointly affected by individual, organizational and environmental factors. This study aims to unpack its configurational framework and propose strategies to strengthen core hospital leaders’ transformational leadership.
Patients and Methods: Data were collected from an online questionnaire among 31 core hospital leaders. The fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was used to explore the causal mechanism of high-level transformational leadership. We enrich this mechanism by professional background, critical thinking, initiative spirit, family-work conflict, job satisfaction, subordinates’ followership, and work pressure.
Results: Result shows initiative spirit is the only necessary condition (consistency=0.911) for the formation of high-level transformational leadership among core hospital leaders. Three configurations are the sufficient conditions that lead to high-level transformational leadership among core hospital leaders with two different professional backgrounds (overall solution consistency= 0.952).
Conclusion: Core hospital leaders’ initiative spirit is an indispensable condition for improving high-level transformational leadership, emphasizing the necessity for core leaders to be proactive in order to develop such leadership. Besides, the study also uncovered three configurations are the sufficient conditions for core hospital leaders with diverse professional backgrounds to achieve high-level transformational leadership. This finding offers significant insights into hospital management practices, suggesting that core hospital leaders’ work should be managed in a personalized manner based on their professional backgrounds, thereby fostering favorable conditions conducive to the development of their high-level transformational leadership capabilities. Furthermore, the central insight of this study is that the formation of high-level transformational leadership contingent upon the collaboration of professional background, critical thinking, initiative spirit, family-work conflict, job satisfaction, subordinates’ followership, and work pressure, contributing to a holistic and more rigorous view for the development of transformational leadership.

Keywords: transformational leadership, core hospital leaders, hospital management, configuration, fsQCA