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Abstract
The 21st century healthcare industry requires a new leadership capacity to prepare for a multidimensional shift and establish an architecture that comprehensively transforms healthcare delivery to include collaboration across disciplines, sectors, and organizations. Research has shown that such efforts will require conscious change from leaders in order to remove blind spots and co-create a new economy in collaboration with an engaged frontline staff, thus facilitating collaborative learning from the emerging future . Very little research exists on examining healthcare leaders’ consciousness in the form of their emotional intelligence and its potential to address healthcare’s growing disengagement to prepare a collective capacity for the 21st century evolutionary change. Scharmer and Kaufer’s Theory U guided this non-experimental, descriptive and correlational research to investigate the relationship between healthcare leaders’ emotional intelligence and their staff’s work engagement during transformational change in the 21st century healthcare environment. Data for healthcare leaders’ emotional intelligence and staff work engagement was collected in an academic medical institution utilizing two well established and valid surveys. The hypothesis was tested using quantitative analysis including Pearson Product Moment Correlation and descriptive statistics. An associational inferential statistics model was utilized to infer conclusions from the results obtained. While a statistically significant relationship between the variables was not established, the study establishes that healthcare leaders’ emotional intelligence predicts their performance outcomes which positively and significantly predict their staff’s work engagement behaviors during times of change to successfully lead from the emerging new future’s healthcare reality.
