Health professionals’ fear of SARS-CoV-2 and leadership’s role in pandemic period

Abstract

Introduction: The role of leadership in ensuring quality health care is essential for healthcare professionals in managing situations never seen before. Purpose: Investigation of factors influencing the fear of Primary Health Care (PHC) professionals in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the leadership model style that affects their feeling of fear. Material and Method: Non-experimental quantitative cross-sectional study of 296 health care workers of the 1st Health Region of Attica. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (M.L.Q. – 5X) and the fear of COVID-19 scale were used. Statistical analysis was carried out by SPSS – version 22, parametric t-test and one-way ANOVA tests were used while the level of statistical significance was set at 0.05. Results: A positive correlation of health professionals’ fear with age (p=0.016), years of service (p=0.006), fear of infection of their loved ones (p= 0.001) and the absence of psychological support (p=0.030) was found. The most prevalent leadership model is the transformational style with the most frequent use of the “Idealized Attributes” dimension (p<0.001 for all comparisons) and the leadership model to be avoided in the covid-19 pandemic is Laissez-Faire of passive style (p= 0.043). Conclusions: Fear is an important factor in managing the pandemic. It is important that health care managers should alleviate concerns, create a sense of satisfaction among healthcare professionals and at the same time ensure high quality healthcare at all stages of the crisis from escalation to resolution.