Safer Surgery part 17. There have been few research investigations into how highly trained doctors and nurses work together to achieve safe and efficient anaesthesia and surgery. While there have been major advances in surgical and anaesthetic procedures, there are still significant risks for patients during operations and adverse events are not unknown. Due to rising concern about patient safety, surgeons and anaesthetists have looked for ways of minimising adverse events. | 134 Safer Surgery attributes and characteristics associated with leaders are requisites of followers as well referred to as good leadership or as good followership. Van Vugt 2006 who evaluated vast psychological literature on leadership as a database to test several evolutionary hypotheses about the leadership and followership in humans found that leadership correlates well with initiative taking trait measures of intelligence specific task competencies and several indicators of generosity but he found no link between leadership and dominance. Burke and co-workers 2006 p. 302 who conducted a meta-analysis to examine the relationship between leadership behaviour in teams and behaviourally based team performance outcomes found that Surprisingly the results of the current literature review indicate the preponderance of empirical research conducted to date to examine team leadership has largely been grounded in traditional leadership theory. In other words researchers are just transporting traditional theories of leadership to team settings. This is a concern because classical leadership theories have often been criticized for failing to fully appreciate and model the dynamism and complexities of team leadership Kozlowski and Bell 2002 Salas Stagl and Burke 2004 Ziegert 2004 . In fact most existing leadership theories are advanced as if leaderfollower relationships exist in a vacuum . House and Aditya 1997 p. 445 As current leadership theory and research predominantly refers to leader style Avolio 2007 argues that future work needs to consider the dynamic interplay between leaders and followers. Presumptions about leadership and followership - such as leaders are more important than followers followers are only doing what they are told followers get their energy and aims from the leader - should be challenged also in theory and research regarding medical teams. Our general working hypothesis is that all team members are important for successful goal achievement and .
