This study examines the relationship between the structure of intra-organizational advice networks and leadership in health care organizations. Drawing on social network theories and network-based approaches to leadership, we propose that health professionals’ structural brokerage, the diversity of their network contacts, and gender are related to their leadership, as perceived by other organizational members. We collected demographic, social network and leadership data from a population of health care professionals in a large, top-tier local health authority in the Italian National Health Service. The results show that the structural brokerage and network diversity – i.e., advice relations that span different professional groups – of health care professionals positively affect their likelihood of being perceived as leaders by other organizational members. We also find that gender moderates the relationship between brokerage and leadership, such that female brokers are more likely than men to be perceived as leaders. The present findings are relevant to the literature on leadership and social networks, as they identify the role that individual and network characteristics play on the emergence of informal leaders in health care organizations.
