Welcome to the final issue of the Journal for 2021

It has been another extraordinary year for the health system and its leaders across the globe as the pandemic wrought unplanned and unplotted transformation. It seems apparent that the pace of change is with us to stay and casting forward in 2022, we can expect more challenges as we grapple with some of the unknowns of living with Covid. As health leaders, managers and executives, we are extremely aware that we step forward to “living with COVID” with an exhausted workforce, a potential tsunami of demand on our own mental health care capabilities, and indeed the demand from all those previously usual activities that have been left untended in the past two years. It is in these times that we must lead with compassion – the need for empathic, caring leadership has never been greater. I hope, too, that we understand that we are not alone and that it is the support of our peers that will make this journey forward a little bit easier.

Nurse Perceived of Caring Leadership: A Qualitative Descriptive Study

BACKGROUND: The leader’s attitude or behavior to staff or subordinates greatly determined a conducive working atmosphere in a hospital. Decrease in performance and job dissatisfaction will impact work productivity, attendance (absenteeism), the quality of services provided, and the exit of the workforce itself (turn-over). This is why the importance of a harmonious relationship between a leader and his staff or subordinates. AIM: This study aims to determine nurses’ views regarding caring leadership of the head of the room. METHODS: The research method used in this study is descriptive qualitative with a face-to-face interview. Fifteen registered nurses were involved in this study that interacts directly to the patient and nurse manager. The data were analyzed by content analysis. RESULTS: Nurse perceived caring leadership, including giving positive feelings, listening, encouraging, influencing, experience, proactive, and struggling for the subordinates. CONCLUSION: A deep understanding of caring leadership could bring the curricula with the new course of caring leadership. The student can learn and practice from the early time. It would bring a caring attitude as a part of their own life.

The Relationship between Caring for Employees and the Well-being of the Organisation

The aim of this paper is to better understand the meaning of caring for employees at the organisational level as well as to disclose its relationship with the well-being of the organisation. It explores literature on caring for employees at the organisational level by integrating two research streams – the relational and morality perspectives. Building on the findings of this literature review, a number of propositions are proposed that associate the well-being of the organisation with many antecedent factors, i.e., strategic caring, perceived organisational support, disinterested organisational support, organisational caring, caring culture, caring climate and caring leadership. This paper contributes to the literature on the well-being of the organisational members at the level of the organisation.

Caring leadership as Nietzschean slave morality

In this paper, I respond to calls for more critical reflection on the power dynamics of caring leadership. I consider how a combination of care and impotence might unfold as Nietzsche’s ‘slave morality’, crystallised in the phenomenon of ressentiment. At the heart of slave morality is an inversion of values in which everything represented by the Other is denigrated so that the slave can find meaning and solace in his own place in the world. The Nietzschean inversion transforms impotence, inferiority and submission into virtue, identity and accomplishment. In contrast to recent elaborations of ressentiment in followers, I argue that slave morality is something to which leaders, especially caring leaders, are also vulnerable. When caring leadership awakens or exposes the slave-within, we are unable to take charge of – or responsibility for – ourselves, because we have ceded control of the self to forces beyond the self. This is the risk of ‘care ethics’ as a systemic inversion of values which constructs an ideology out of letting others define who and what we are. It creates a breeding ground for ressentiment, feeding off unspoken and unspeakable grievances about the injustices of one’s lot, especially those involving a clash between the rhetoric of empowerment and the experience of impotence. The Nietzschean warning is: Be wary of leadership models which might look and even feel nice, but which turn self-sacrifice into virtue and silence into necessity.