Complements on the power of the leaders of hospitals in Portugal: gender perceptions in the light of institutional theory

Abstract

This article confirms and expands the preliminary results presented in the article en[1]titled “Portuguese hospitals leaders’ power: the perspective of institutional theory on gender perception differences among nurses”, published in number 3 of volume 5 of the Brazilian Journal of Health Economics, in December 2013 (Correia et al., 2013). Giving emphasis to the issue of gender, and delimited by the conceptual framework of institutional theory, a survey of 840 employees of Portuguese hospitals was conducted. Given the perceptions on the power held by the leader of each hospital, the results confirm the absence of statistical evidence that lead to consider the existence of differences according to gender, not only for nurses, but also for the globality of Portuguese hospital employees, taken as a whole.