A Parsonian Approach to Patient Safety: Transformational Leadership and Social Capital as Preconditions for Clinical Risk Management—the GI Factor

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of the combination of transformational leadership and social capital in safety capacity building. Drawing on the A-G-I-L concept of Talcott Parsons, we test a model for patient safety. The hypothesis is, that good safety management needs a combination of goal attainment (G) and integration (I), here called the GI factor. We tested this hypothesis by using transformational leadership as a surrogate for goal attainment and social capital as a surrogate for integration in a study of the perceptions of chief medical officers in 551 German hospitals. We conducted a cross-sectional hospital survey combined with secondary data analysis in all German hospitals with at least one internal medicine unit and one surgery unit (N = 1224 hospitals) in the year 2008 with a response rate of 45% (N = 551). The regression model explained 17.9% of the variance in perceived clinical risk management. We found that if both requirements for goal-oriented collective action—transformational leadership and social capital—are met, good safety management is more likely. The tentative conclusion is that it takes transformative leaders and cohesive followers together as a social basis to improve safety in hospitals.