Professionalism among academic educational leaders: A concept analysis.

INTRODUCTION

The concept of professional ethics of academic educational leaders is an abstract concept for which several highly context-dependent definitions have been provided in the literature. The analysis of this concept is critical to reaching a shared understanding, developing behavioral standards, and designing evaluation measures at universities of medical sciences.

METHODS

To explain the concept of professionalism among academic educational leaders, Walker and Avant's eight-stage concept analysis method was adopted. After an extensive review of resources, 37 articles were included and the antecedents, attributes, and consequences of the concept were extracted.

RESULTS

An examination of the resources and concept analysis revealed that professionalism in academic educational leaders has three main attributes of care ethics, justice-oriented ethics, and ethics of criticism, and its formation depends on personal characteristics, professional capabilities, and having a systemic view.

CONCLUSIONS

The identification of components and professional characteristics of professionalism among academic educational leaders provides a shared understanding of professionalism and is a basic step towards designing measures to evaluate this concept.