Shared governance: a literature review

This paper sets out to establish what is meant by shared governance, analyses the literature on shared governance implementation, and discusses emergent issues. The paper is based on research funded by the Department of Health (England) and by North Staffordshire NHS Trust. A literature search was undertaken using the terms ‘shared governance’ and ‘empowerment’, restricted to English language. The databases used were CINAHL, British Nursing Index, Medline, Social Sciences Citation Index and FirstSearch, and the search period was January 1988–May 1998. Initially, nearly 500 articles were identified. This search also highlighted articles describing participative management, professional practice models, and self-managed work teams. For the purposes of this review, only published articles which either described and/or evaluated the implementation of shared governance were analysed. According to these criteria, 48 studies, which were obtained by the cut-off date, were included for detailed assessment.