Identifying Leadership Competencies in Medical and Dental Healthcare Professionals in Pakistan

To identify and empirically investigate the leadership competencies in medical and dental healthcare professionals in Pakistan. A quantitative, cross-sectional descriptive study with a survey was used to identify the perceived leadership competencies in medical and dental healthcare professionals in Pakistan. 142 medical and dental faculty members and clinicians were selected from four medical and dental colleges and hospitals in Rawalpindi/Islamabad and each participated in an in-person survey. The participants were educators and physicians who held academic positions in medical and dental education. A total of 142 completed the survey out of which 88 (62%) were women and 54 (38%) were men. Mean age of women was 38 years and mean age of men was 42 years. A 63-item survey measuring leadership competencies developed by Fadil Citaku, et al. [1], was administered in person to all participants. The five features recognized as leadership proficiencies required for healthcare professions were (1) social responsibility, (2) innovation, (3) self-management, (4) task management and (5) leading others. Cronbach’s alpha values of all domains were above 0.7, indicating scale was reliable and items were stable and internally consistent. Cronbach alpha of the entire questionnaire was 0.961. The means of the Likert score for all the five major variables (scales) were between 3.57 (honesty and integrity) and 4.30 (personal decision quality). The results of Principal component analysis done on the questionnaire data yielded five competencies of leadership including task management, social responsibility, innovation, self-management, and leading others with high coherence and internal consistency. These identified leadership skills are considered important by all doctors, dentists, males, females, assistant professors and professors alike.