Guest editorial: Contextualising leadership – the impact of strategy and culture in healthcare and disability services

Abstract

More contemporary approaches, as Schedlitzki and Edwards (2021) outline, encompass concerns with context, followership, power and politics, a wider distribution of leaders, culture, communication, learning, gender and diversity, ethics and even the Phoenix leaders managing change in contemporary firestorm disruption (Woodward et al., 2021). The flip side of this is what Hofmann and Vermunt (2020, p. 252) claim is the need "to develop a conceptually sound outcome model for clinical leadership (CL) development in healthcare, linking individual professional learning and organisational change.” Yet, context is crucial in consideration of aspects of leadership in health services. [...]for us, the interconnectedness of healthcare and the disability sector is an ever-growing consideration and challenge, especially with the introduction and implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme in Australia and the recent Australian Royal Commission into the Disability sector. Leaders were required to develop innovative responses to service delivery (including face-to-face and digital responses), redirect and re-train workforces, develop new clinical and social supports, and manage the safe return to work to those who fell ill (Phillips et al., 2022;Whelehan et al., 2021).