How do leaders foster morally courageous behavior in employees? Leader role modeling, moral ownership, and felt obligation

Empathy toward patients is an essential skill for a physician to deliver the best care for any patient. Empathy also protects the physician from moral injury and decreases the chances for malpractice litigations. The current graduate medical education curriculum allows trainees to graduate without getting focused training to develop empathy as a core competency domain. The tools to measure empathy inherently lack validity. The accurate measure of the provider’s empathy comes from the patient’s perspectives of their experience and their feedback, which is rarely reaching the trainee. The hidden curriculum in residency programs gives mixed messages to trainees due to inadequate role modeling by attending physicians. This narrative style manuscript portrays a teachable moment at the bedside vividly. The teaching team together reflected upon the lack of empathy, took steps to resolve the issue. The attending demonstrated role modeling as an authentic and impactful technique to teach empathy. The conclusion includes a proposal to include the patient’s real-time feedback to trainees as an essential domain under Graduate Medical Education core competencies of professionalism and patient care.

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The enigmatic role of role modeling in clinical education

The Clinical Teacher ◽

10.1111/tct.13315 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Frederic W. Hafferty

Keyword(s):

Clinical Education ◽

Role Modeling

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Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: A Conceptual Model of the Antecedents and Consequences of Leader Impostorism

Journal of Management ◽

10.1177/01492063211020358 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 014920632110203

Author(s):

Ronit Kark ◽

Alyson Meister ◽

Kim Peters

Keyword(s):

Popular Media ◽

Empirical Literature ◽

Leadership Roles ◽

Leadership Positions ◽

Motivation To Lead ◽

Fertile Ground ◽

Contextual Characteristics ◽

Antecedents And Consequences ◽

Formal Leadership ◽

Leader Role

Impostorism, a phenomenon whereby a person perceives that the role they occupy is beyond their capabilities and puts them at risk of exposure as a “fake,” has attracted plentiful attention in the empirical literature and popular media. However, despite evidence that impostorism is frequently experienced by people in leadership positions, there has been little consideration of why this happens. In this theoretical article, we explain why formal leadership roles—roles that are characterized by elevated expectations, high visibility, and high levels of responsibility—are fertile ground for impostorism experiences. We also discuss how the associated self-conscious emotions of shame and fear, can increase leaders’ risk-aversion and enhance leader role performance, yet at the same time drive emotional exhaustion, and reduce their motivation to lead. This can ultimately inhibit leaders from seeking, claiming, and thriving in leadership roles. We offer individual-, dyadic-, and organization-level contextual characteristics that can either enhance or reduce this phenomenon. We also discuss how supportive organizations can mitigate leadership impostorism. Furthermore, we highlight how women and minority-status leaders may be more vulnerable to this experience and conclude by suggesting the practical implications of the leader impostorism phenomenon for individuals and organizations.

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