The effects of altruistic leadership on physician-nurse collaboration and leader-member exchange in healthcare organizations

Altruism is the behavior of helping another person without expecting any rewards. Altruistic leadership refers to a leadership style that focuses on the needs of their subordinates. It is stated that human oriented leadership styles have positive effects on various variables in healthcare organizations where altruistic behaviors are constantly exhibited. One of these variables is physician nurse collaboration, and the other is leader member exchange. It is expected that altruistic leadership will have a positive effect on mentioned variables, considering they have the same values at their core. Therefore the aims of the current study are, first to determine the altruistic leadership perceptions of physicians and nurses, their tendencies towards physician-nurse collaboration and their levels of leader-member exchange; secondly, examining whether these findings differ in terms of the individual characteristics of the participants and finally it is aimed to reveal whether the altruistic leadership perceptions of physicians and nurses have an effect on their tendency regarding physician-nurse collaboration and the level of leader-member exchange. The findings obtained from a total of 192 physicians and nurses working in a training and research hospital operating in Ankara were evaluated. Analysis results showed that the altruistic leadership perceptions and leader-member exchange levels of the participants were above the average; and their tendency of physician-nurse collaboration was found to be high. In terms of their sociodemographic attributes, participants showed statistically significant differences in their mean scores regarding all of the variables. According to the findings obtained from the regression analyses, it was determined that altruistic leadership sub-dimensions had positive effects on physician-nurse collaboration, leader-member exchange and their sub-dimensions. In line with the results obtained from the research findings, it is recommended that healthcare managers, who aim to increase the levels of physician nurse collaboration and leader member exchange, should exhibit altruistic leadership behaviors.