How Perspective Taking Helps Clinical Leadership Development From Within: Looking Through the Identity Motives Lens to Address Major Challenges and Opportunities

This thesis explores how perspective taking can help to improve clinical leadership by addressing major challenges experienced by clinical and non-clinical leaders in clinical teams. Identity motives theory is used as a lens to explore the potential of perspective taking to improve clinical leadership. This exploratory study builds a theory, grounded in the data from in-depth interviews with clinical leaders, to help implement perspective taking in different professional teams. Interviews were held with doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, midwives, and non-clinical managers in a case study of NHS Tayside, one of the largest Scottish health boards. This research contributes to theory on perspective taking, clinical leadership, and identity motives by revealing important dynamic relations between these concepts, which are under-researched. This study also contributes to practice by showing how healthcare organisations such as the NHS can develop perspective taking through strategies to improve awareness, cognition, and appreciation of each other’s identity motives, challenges, opportunities, and motivations to see issues from each other’s viewpoints. The study develops a new perspective-taking toolkit (PTT) that will guide healthcare organisations and human resource (HR) professionals on ways to implement perspective taking into clinical leadership to enhance understanding between different teams, professional groups, and levels of the organisation, and thus improve clinical leadership development and engagement.