A Holistic Transcendental Leadership Model for Enhancing Innovation, Creativity and Well-Being in Health Care

Abstract

Burnout in health care employees and leaders is at an all-time high. Strategies to address burnout can fall short of addressing the broad range of underlying causes, including both organizational culture and personal factors. The National Academies of Medicine has set forth recommendations to address health care burnout from a leadership-based systems level that focuses on the whole employee, body, mind, and spirit. Across generations and societies, there is a growing trend toward spirituality and meaning as a critical component of both personal life and work. Among the working-age millennials, values of purpose and greater societal good take precedent and impact work choices and behaviors. Spiritually based values such as a sense of purpose, the transcendence of the self and ego, and the acknowledgment of something greater than our collective selves, are present in both popular culture and research on transcendental models of leadership. This article presents a model of holistic transcendental leadership that can be leveraged in the health care workplace to enhance innovation and creativity, while placing a novel emphasis on the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being at the individual, group, and organizational level.

Keywords: creativity; holistic; innovation; spirituality; transcendence/transformation.