Soft skills between professional ideals and organizational constraints: healthcare professionals' perspectives

Healthcare professionals operate in complex and rapidly changing environments, where quality of care depends not only on clinical expertise but also on soft skills such as empathy, communication, teamwork, emotional regulation, and adaptive decision-making. Yet soft skills are often treated as professional ideals, and less is known about how healthcare professionals understand and enact them under routine organizational constraints. This qualitative study examined how professionals define, interpret, and experience soft skills in everyday work within a complex and rapidly changing healthcare context. By moving beyond normative accounts of soft skills, the study seeks to clarify how these competencies are experienced as context-dependent practices embedded within organizational realities.

Based on 37 in-depth semi-structured online interviews conducted between 2023 and 2024 with healthcare professionals working in large public hospitals and health maintenance organizations, including physicians, nurses, and healthcare providers. Data were analyzed inductively using thematic analysis.

Five interrelated themes were identified: (1) Soft Skills as a Shared Professional Ideal (2) Time and Workload Pressure (3) Emotional Strain and the Gradual Erosion of Soft Skills (4) Soft Skills as Developable Capacities Within Supportive Organizational Environments; and (5) Navigating Change and Digital Transformation in a VUCA Healthcare Environment. The findings reveal a persistent gap between the normative framing of soft skills and their conditional enactment in practice, shaped by workload intensity, emotional strain, and systemic pressures.

Overall, soft skills emerged as essential yet fragile professional resources whose enactment is contingent on time, emotional capacity, and organizational support. The study contributes theoretically by conceptualizing soft skills not as stable individual attributes, but as situated professional practices mediated by organizational conditions and systemic change. The findings suggest that strengthening soft skills requires closer alignment between educational preparation and workplace realities through longitudinal development, structured practice opportunities, and organizational cultures that recognize and protect relational work as a core component of healthcare practice.

Not applicable.