A Systematized Review of the Effective Leadershipin Medical Universities

Medical universities as suppliers of health system human resources need to effective leaders for promotion of medical education status in the country. The present study is an attempt to review the literature on academic leadership and to identify research gaps related to this issue in medical universities. This systematized review was conducted by searching databases of ERIC, Pubmed, SID, Scopus, Web of Science, Emerald Proquest, and Google Scholar by appropriate keywords selected from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) documents related to academic leadership that were published on databases in 2009- 2020.The published articles were reviewed (n=505), and after deletion of duplicates, and according to the research inclusion and exclusion criteria 20 articles were reviewed. The quality of selected documents was appraised by MERSQI . Reviewing the selected studies indicated that the leadership studies are mostly conducted in humanities universities. The studies on academic leadership in medical universities are mostly dealt with the relationship of characteristics of academic leaders and leadership styles. In medical universities, most of the managers who are physicians has not attended management and leadership programs and believe that they do not need to attend these programs. According to the findings of this study, only one research studied challenges and requirements of effective academic leadership in the country. Therefore, conducting qualitative studies on leadership in universities of medical sciences that provides an opportunity for deep study of experiences, believes and attitudes of academic leaders deem necessary.