LEADERSHIP RESEARCH IN HEALTH CARE IN TURKEY

It is known that studies on leadership in health care in Turkey had gained increasing importance with the coming of 2000's and until 2000's, a very limited number of studies had been carried out on the subject. Moreover, there had not been any studies examining the previous studies on the subject in terms of the leadership characteristics that had been taken in focus, who were taken as samples or what kind of variables had been taken into account. The purpose of this study is to examine the studies on leadership in health care services that had been carried out between 2000 and 2013; and gather them into various categories besides trying to find out their common points and fundamental tendencies. Studies on the above mentioned subject between 2000 and 2013 in Turkey had been determined via browsing in various databases (n=70) and these had been examined in terms of the kind of the study, study design, the year of the study, participants, health institution at which the study had been carried out, the scale that was used and primary topic area. According to the findings, a considerable number (62.9%) of the 70 studies on leadership in health care services in Turkey between 2000 and 2013 was composed of Master's and PhD theses while the rest was (37.1%) composed of articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. 67 of these studies were based on research and in nearly half of them, nurses constituted the research participants. Most studies on leadership had been conducted in public health institutions and university hospitals. With the increasing number of scientific research in the field of health services since 2008, it had been determined that most studies had been conducted between 2010 and 2012. The most common subjects of study were various determinants of the leader, leadership perceptions and at a rate of approximately one-third of the studies were concerned with the effect of leadership styles of managers on their subordinates. This study shows that, despite many studies on leadership in the Turkish health care services literature; there are still health care profession groups that whose characteristics had never been studied, besides there are still fundamental areas and leadership characteristics which had never been or seldom studied. It is thought that the results of this study will help researchers who want to work on leadership in health care services in the future.