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. This study attempted to examine the integrated and coordinated capacity of healthcare leadership and workforce to successfully lead from the emerging new future's healthcare reality by investigating the association between healthcare leaders' emotional intelligence and their staff's work engagement during transformational change. Designed as a non-experimental, descriptive and correlational research, 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 transformative change. The direct association between the healthcare leaders' emotional intelligence and staff work engagement during transformational change showed a trend toward the positive. The study's practical implications for today's healthcare organizations and suggestions for future research are discussed.
Keywords
Transformational Change, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Work Engagement, Healthcare Leadership