Personal Characteristics and Leadership Soft Skills Affecting Physical Therapist Performance in Heath Region 8

Abstract

This Cross-sectional descriptive research aimed to study personal characteristics and leadership soft skills affecting physical therapist performance in Heath Region 8 Thailand. A set of 138 samples was randomly selected by stratified random sampling techniques from 288 of populations. Data were collected by questionnaires for quantitative data and in-depth interviews for qualitative data gathering from 12 key informants. Questionnaires were examined and verified by three experts for content validity with items objective congruence (IOC), which all items were more than 0.50, and reliability with Cronbach's alpha coefficient was at 0.97. Data were collected between 10th November 2022 to 10th December 2022. Data analysis was performed by descriptive and inferential statistics Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient, Stepwise multiple linear regression at a significant level of 0.05.

The results showed that the overall level of leadership soft skills and physical therapist performance were at a high level with the averages of 4.11 (S.D. = 0.42) and 4.35 (S.D. = 0.41) respectively. The overall of leadership soft skills had a high relationship with physical therapist performance (r = 0.740 p-value = 0.001). Four variables of leadership soft skills: planning and organizing; coaching; creativity; and team work affected and could jointly predicted physical therapist performance in Heath Region 8 at 71.3 percentage. (R = 0.713, p-value <0.001)