Question

How leadership communication might incorporate cultural sensitivity, and why would this be an important skill for the public health professional?

Answer 1

If the representatives were culturally competent, it was hypothesised that healthcare workers would be more likely to be culturally competent. The leadership impact was also hypothesised to rely on the characteristics of the leader, including the leaders' skill in cultural competence.

Healthcare staff 's cultural competence was positively related to the leaders' cultural competence, but this impact did not continue for overall cultural competence after the contextual and sociodemographic variables were monitored. For model and mediation competencies, however, the effect persisted. These results partially support the theory that if their most significant colleagues were culturally competent, healthcare workers were more likely to be culturally competent.

There is a significant body of literature on organisational variables that affect cultural competence. The more formally and informally the organisational atmosphere embraces and facilitates culturally sensitive evaluation and service delivery, the more likely cultural expertise is to be established by health professionals. In order to promote the adoption and/or dissemination of culturally competent behaviours, the development of positive leadership skills for intercultural care or a dedication to intercultural care was recommended. Cultural competence champions or, in other words, prominent leaders of cultural competence were recommended as organisational strategies to help the developers. Despite this awareness of the significance of organisational factors, there have been very few empirical studies examining the functional effects on cultural competence of such organisational factors. To our knowledge, our research is one of the first to examine the effect of leaders' cultural competence on health workers' cultural competence.

The study of engagement helps to shed light on the processes by which healthcare staff can be affected by leaders: leaders with expert roles have had a greater positive effect on certain aspects of healthcare staff's cultural competence than leaders without relevant expertise. Therefore, "expert" leadership will tend to be a key determinant of the transmission of cultural competence amongst them. In other words , the results imply that cultural competence can be distributed among health professionals rather than through the Pygmalion effect or structured leadership (e.g., head nurse) through role-modeling. Role-modeling seeks to help people understand what can not be taught, such as kindness, caring attitudes toward patients, or professionalism. As a result, more emphasis should be placed on positive role-modeling practises and, therefore, on the social learning of cultural skills in the education of health professionals and in lifelong learning programmes. Mentorship, for instance, has been shown to have a positive impact on the development of the skills of health professionals. The role played by peer effects should be investigated by more research, as individual attitudes can be affected more by homophilic peers than by people in a position of authority.