The hard truth about soft skills: Exploring the association between leadership competency and career advancement of allied health professionals

Backgroud: Globally, employee engagement in healthcare organisations is low, with career advancement one of its main determinants. It may be useful for healthcare organisations to determine the factors of career advancement, to guide them to more effectively engage their workforce. Leadership competency is factor that may be crucial in influencing career advancement for healthcare employees. To our knowledge, a comprehensive analysis on its impact on the perception of career advancement within the healthcare setting has not been conducted. Research Design: An ecological, cross-sectional study was conducted, aimed at examining the association between leadership competency of healthcare professionals and perceptions of career advancement. Poisson generalized-estimating-equation models were fitted to estimate the adjusted rate ratios with bootstrap 95% confidence intervals for the associations of the AHEAD items with the number of favourable responses on the career advancement items. In each model, we accounted for clustering by departments and controlled for length of service as a confounder. Results: Statistically significant predictors of perception of career advancement were found, and included skills - Interpersonal Skills (aRR 1.53 CI 1.12–2.96), Motivating (aRR 1.31 CI 1.10–2.16), and Mentoring (aRR 1.30 CI 1.08–1.13); and values - Compassion (aRR 1.37 CI 1.17–3.40), and Collegiality (aRR 1.31 CI 1.00–1.99). Conclusion: Our findings show an association between some components of leadership competency and the perception of career advancement. These results provide initial evidence that apart from hard skills, soft skills may play an equally (or more important) role in influencing the perception of career advancement.