The Impact of Culture on Leadership in Healthcare Services : The case of Elekta-Greece

Sammanfattning: Purpose: The purpose of this study is to comprehend and analyse the impact of national culture on leadership within the healthcare industry. Method: This is an exploratory research in which qualitative data have been used. Interviews have been held with employees at Elekta-Greece EPE, Athens in Greece. As for validity and reliability, the data for this study were collected from a real business case (Elekta) via Skype interviews and then the responses were transcribed and later analysed in relation to fundamental academic research in combination with our critical thinking. Findings & Conclusions: By conducting this study, we discovered that culture can play a major role in the leadership behaviour for companies that operate within the healthcare industry on a global scale. Both national and corporate cultures influence the leader(s) and the employees of a company, either in a positive or a negative way. Cultural attributes, background, history, policies, rules and regulations are some of the factors that can be a game „‟changer‟‟ for the leadership of international companies. Those characteristics can affect work performance, job satisfaction, and the image of the company. Finally our conclusions also suggest that there is a difference between other industries and healthcare industry because of the power structure and the rigidness of the last one. Originality & Value: This research is unique in its kind due to the fact that there is no similar case or literature that examines the impact of national culture on leadership for international healthcare companies, like Elekta. However, there has been some research conducted within this industry during the last years, covering the subject of marketing. Limitations & Future Research: The limitation of this research is that it is a single case study so it cannot represent and be reflected for the whole healthcare industry. Also we could not acquire raw data from the parent company so we based the comparison on the data from Elekta-Greece and secondary data for the parent company. As for further investigation we suggest the expansion of this topic by conducting more case studies, add more countries at the same time in order to be able to create results that can be generalized for a successful cultural leadership on health-care industry.