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The extant leadership research has paid increasing attention to the concept of motivation to lead (MTL) as an individual construct that strongly affects leadership processes and behaviors. However, despite its importance, scant knowledge is available about how individual characteristics and organizational structural features interact in influencing MTL in professional-based organizations. This article contributes to this line of research by adopting a multilevel perspective to study the MTL among individual professionals in the healthcare sector. We collected data from a sample of 791 physicians nested in 44 departments belonging to 27 hospitals. Using the hierarchical linear model, we tested the impact of individual and organizational variables on the motivation of physicians to engage in managerial positions. Our findings demonstrate that the physicians' MTL was positively associated with their individual self-efficacy. Departmental decentralization interacted with this selfefficacy, such that the effect of self-efficacy on the MTL was significantly lower when decentralization was high. We discuss the implications of these findings for human resource management and organizational (re)design within professional organizations.

We take a meso approach towards investigating the interplay between perceptions of individual employees regarding human resource (HR) practices and the variability of such perceptions within the Department (i.e., HRM strength) and their effects. This study included 2821 healthcare professionals (i.e. nurses, head nurses, technicians, obstetricians, and allied health staff) nested in 44 departments of 27 hospitals. Cross-level moderation analyses revealed that individual perceptions of HR practices positively predict individual perceptions of proactivity climate, moderated by HRM strength in the corresponding department. As hypothesized, idiosyncratic perceptions of HR practices predict perceived proactivity when HRM strength is weak because ambiguous situations are interpreted based on direct experience; on the other hand, strong situations reduce the reliance on individual experiences making perceptions of proactivity climate more homogeneous with one another. This enables the emergence of a collective climate for proactivity (i.e., individual perceptions of proactivity aggregated at the department level) which, consistent with our hypothesis, positively predicts appropriateness of care. These findings shed light on the processes by which HR practices are effective and have important implications for HR managers and professionals with regard to extending the involvement of individuals in HR practices.

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