Shared leadership in Finnish social and health care

Abstract

Purpose – The background reports covering the ongoing reforms in Finnish social service and health care noted that people managing in this field were presented with certain challenges. These included such human resource management challenges as support for the implementation of new work practices, employee commitment, motivation and maintaining wellbeing at work. The purpose of this paper, as part of investigating some of these human resource challenges, is to investigate the occurrence of shared leadership among middle‐level managers in social service and health care, based on self‐evaluations of the managers' own leadership.Design/methodology/approach – Questionnaires were sent to 703 middle‐level managers (managers above first‐line management level) in social service and health care in municipalities and municipal federations within the area of responsibility of a university hospital. There were 433 responses indicating a response rate of 62 per cent. The data from the questionnaires were assessed usin...