Developing Leader Identity in a Healthcare Profession: A Phenomenological Study

Healthcare organizations face growing demands concerning leadership of strong but diverse professions, related expertise, and special medical fields. The ability of healthcare leaders to develop a sense of self as a leader, leader identity, while still continuing emotionally meaningful clinical work is a challenge for leaders, an important but under-researched phenomenon. To illuminate the research gap and the challenge this study takes an existential-phenomenological approach to describe the development of experienced leader identity of 25 physician and nurse leaders. The study also applies the concept of shadow to describe the features complicating leader identity development. The results suggest leader identity development to be a multidimensional process in which the attachment to the profession and contents of professional identity play major roles by affecting the way leader starts to experience him/herself as a leader. In the process, shadows for leadership can form either from the leader’s own sense of expected compared to desirable leadership, or, leader’s perceptions of contradictions between professional and leader roles. In order the leader identity to develop and related, complicating shadows to be as light as possible, the study suggests the most essential feature to be individual’s own desire, will and intrinsic motivation to become and be a leader.