Exploring professionals’ motivation to lead: a cross-level study in the healthcare sector.

The extant leadership research has paid increasing attention to the concept of\r\nmotivation to lead (MTL) as an individual construct that strongly affects leadership\r\nprocesses and behaviors. However, despite its importance, scant knowledge is available\r\nabout how individual characteristics and organizational structural features interact in\r\ninfluencing MTL in professional-based organizations. This article contributes to this\r\nline of research by adopting a multilevel perspective to study the MTL among\r\nindividual professionals in the healthcare sector. We collected data from a sample of\r\n791 physicians nested in 44 departments belonging to 27 hospitals. Using the\r\nhierarchical linear model, we tested the impact of individual and organizational\r\nvariables on the motivation of physicians to engage in managerial positions. Our\r\nfindings demonstrate that the physicians’ MTL was positively associated with their\r\nindividual self-efficacy. Departmental decentralization interacted with this selfefficacy,\r\nsuch that the effect of self-efficacy on the MTL was significantly lower when\r\ndecentralization was high. We discuss the implications of these findings for human\r\nresource management and organizational (re)design within professional organizations