The complexities inherent in healthcare organisations highlight the multifaceted nature of their operations. Regardless of role, scale, procedural intricacies or governance structures, these organisations need to deal with the complexities of both internal dynamics and external landscapes. The diversity of stakeholders involved adds layers of challenge to effectively managing clinical and social processes, optimising outcomes, allocating resources equitably, developing and retaining a skilled workforce, making informed decisions and upholding ethical standards.

The financial management of healthcare organisations is a key management responsibility for both public and private facilities. While this responsibility has always been important, it is becoming increasingly more so, with the rising costs of healthcare provision due to advances in technology and rising rates of chronic disease and ageing populations. The responsible use and management of scarce healthcare resources requires knowledge and information. The accounting process provides the necessary information to develop and monitor a budget. However, it is the financial management of the budget and associated activity levels that provide the necessary framework to ensure budget integrity and financial governance.

Values permeate every aspect of our lives, shaping individual actions and giving meaning, direction and scope to our work environments and organisational cultures. Defining positive behaviours and identifying unprofessional, disrespectful or negative behaviours shape and define every aspect of our work and personal lives. Values also have an emotional component: when we act in accordance with our values, we experience positive emotions; conversely, when we act against our values or are placed in situations that compromise our values, we experience emotional dissonance. It is this emotional component that drives us to seek values alignment in our personal and professional lives.

Leadership is an elusive concept. Key authors cannot agree on the characteristics of leaders, but all agree that leadership is about relationships and evolves over time. For example, Rost and Barker state that ‘leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes and outcomes that reflect a shared purpose’. Meanwhile, Landsdale suggests that ‘effective leaders enable people to move in the same direction, toward the same destinations, at the same speed, but not because they have been forced to, but because they want to’. This raises the question of how we get people to want to go in the same direction and at the same pace. In the health services, this is particularly challenging because of the multidisciplinary nature of the key stakeholders. It requires appropriate leadership of interprofessional teams.

Networks, which are defined as groups or systems of interconnected people or things, can be formal and informal in nature and can be applied for different purposes. The capability to network can build influence in groups and organisations to support change or generate new ideas. The process of networking can be seen as a supportive system of sharing information and services among individuals, groups and organisations with a common interest. Networking can be applied at a personal level for career and leadership development, at an intraorganisational level for organisational development and at an interorganisational level for research, knowledge management, process improvement and relationship development.

Everyone creates influence during their lives. This may be consciously or unconsciously, through communication, actions or behaviours. A person can be influential through who they are or what they do, such as through their creativity, dependency, vulnerability, position and example. In complex health organisations, we need effective leadership that articulates vision, inspires, provides guidance and influences, and strong management to plan, organise, direct and control. Leaders and managers have different roles, functions and skill sets. These actions may be visionary, inspirational, task-focused, long or short term, through empowerment and supervision. These roles and responsibilities may be different but need to achieve impact in influencing.

Effective leadership and management can have a ‘strong positive influence on workplace empowerment, increase nurses’ job satisfaction and decrease the frequency of adverse patient outcomes’. Healthcare professionals must understand the main theories of leadership and management and how these approaches translate into improving work practices, so that they might develop their own work capacity. This chapter presents leadership and management theories used by healthcare professionals to inform their practice.

Politics is an inevitable feature of organisational life, particularly in large bureaucratic organisations such as hospitals or government departments. Political activities arise when there is a lack of consensus about how an organisation should be managed. They are typically employed to reconcile these divergent interests, which may be the result of competition for resources within the organisation, the pursuit of personal goals by individuals or a high level of uncertainty within the organisation.

In a flurry of activity that peaked in the late 1950s, a cohort of activists from the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania participated in a global landscape of anticolonial activism. They travelled to hubs like Delhi, London, Cairo and Accra, navigating Cold War internationalisms as students, exiles and political representatives. They formed committees, manned offices, published pamphlets, launched newsletters and corresponded with international organisations. And yet, often, their committees collapsed, they struggled with stationery shortages, their pamphlet manuscripts were rejected, their newsletters were prevented from reaching readers and they were let down by organisations. The introduction asks how to understand this story against a historiographical backdrop that narrates global anticolonialism through the violent hotspots of international decolonisation. It proposes a microspatial perspective and the conceptual framework of an anticolonial culture, arguing that this regional cohort, by some measures marginal, can help us understand the limits of transnational activism in the unfolding of decolonisation.

Building on the preceding chapters, it examines the survivor as activist in the context of prevention, state mechanisms, and antislavery participation. It exposes the responsibility placed on survivors for participation, the hierarchies of power that mute voice, and the limited ways in which survivors are employed. The chapter goes on to consider the antislavery strategies that survivors themselves suggest and reveal the challenges that survivors face engaging with the public sector to inform antislavery policy. The chapter includes an analysis of the extent of survivor participation in state processes and draws on analysis of the work of survivor activists.

There is no paucity of definitions of the concept of ‘institution’, and often they are somewhat over-encompassing. The chapter discusses several approaches and elaborates on the implications of each of them. The conclusion is that what constitutes an institution is not generalisable and depends largely on the researcher, the object of research and the research question. Different conceptions of institution serve egregiously different research programmes and different types of situations. However, too often different approaches extend their specific understandings of ‘institutions’ to the whole world of institutions, presenting themselves as general theories of institution. This generates inconsistencies when the approach and its theoretical results are applied outside the original scope and extended to the entire universe of institutions. Discussion of the different approaches helps to identify the core properties each highlights and to reconstruct the semantic field of the concept of institution. I focus on the main characterising elements of different understandings.

In this chapter, we examine employee share ownership (ESO) as an example of a collective long-term incentive. An employee share plan is any type of plan that allows some or all employees to acquire shares in the organisation that employs them (Klein 1987). We begin with an overview of the nature and extent of employee share ownership in Western countries. We investigate the theoretical rationale for employee share ownership before examining the empirical research on impact of share plans on organisational performance and employee attitudes and behaviours. Finally, we consider the relationship between employee share ownership and other HR practices, with a particular focus on other forms of performance-related pay.