Towards remote leadership in health care: Lessons learned from an integrative review

Aim: To gather and synthesize current empirical evidence on remote leadership and to provide knowledge that can be used to develop successful remote leadership in health care.

Design: A integrative literature review with an integrated mixed methods design.

Data sources: The literature search was carried out between February and March 2019 in the CINAHL, Medline (Ovid), PsycInfo, Scopus, SocIndex, Web of Science and Business Source Elite (EBSCO) databases.

Review methods: An integrative review was conducted to identify relevant studies published from 2010 to 2019. Of the 88 eligible studies, 21 studies met the inclusion criteria and were selected for the final review. The included studies were analysed using mixed methods synthesis, more specifically, data-based convergent synthesis.

Results: The performed analysis identified three main themes: characteristics of successful remote leadership; enhancing the leader-member relationship; and challenges in remote leadership. The first theme included the following sub-themes: remote leader characteristics; trust; communication; and leading the team culture. The second theme covered the importance of organizing regular face-to-face meetings, clear communication policies and the connection between positive team spirit and good remote leader-member relationship, while the third theme emphasized leader- and member-related challenges for remote work.

Conclusions: As none of the identified studies had been conducted in a health care setting, future remote leadership research must also specifically consider the health care context. This will be pivotal to exploring how remote work can foster a safe workplace culture, empower health care workers, increase job satisfaction and improve patient outcomes.

Impact: Remote leadership has rarely been studied in the health care context. Trust, communication, team spirit and a leader's characteristics are central to remote leadership, a finding which is useful for re-evaluating and improving the current culture at health care organizations.