Dr Krishna Kumar is the focus of our sixth in a series of interviews in Cardiology in the Young entitled, “Global Leadership in Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Care.” Dr Kumar was born in Raurkela, India. He attended medical school at Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi, graduating in 1984. Dr Kumar then went on to complete internal medicine, emergency medicine, and adult cardiology training at All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1988, 1989, and 1990, respectively. He then pursued paediatric cardiology training at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, USA. Dr Kumar began his clinical position as a paediatric cardiologist at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi, Kerala, India.

During his impressive career, Dr Kumar has made significant contributions to educational advancement, research and innovation, public health advocacy, and clinical care. Dr Kumar is credited for distinguishing paediatric cardiology as a distinct subspecialty in India. He was a founding member of the Pediatric Cardiology Society of India and the original editor of the society’s academic journal. Recognising the deficit of paediatric cardiology-trained physicians in low- and middle-income countries, Dr Kumar helped establish formal structured training programmes for paediatric cardiology in India. More recently, he established the Children’s HeartLink Fellowships in paediatric cardiac sciences at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi and Institut Jantung Negara in Malaysia. Through educational programmes, Dr Kumar has taught countless caregivers and paediatricians, in India and neighbouring countries, the early identification and management of children with CHD. Dr Kumar has established a premier paediatric heart programme at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences. As department Chief, he emphasises the importance of teamwork, advocacy, and continuous quality improvement. He has developed numerous low-cost strategies for the management of CHD. He has established large community-based studies on rheumatic heart disease and CHD in South India. Dr Kumar’s focus on advocacy and policy change in India has made a substantial impact on early identification and treatment of CHD in the subcontinent. He has made a global impact on the care of paediatric cardiology patients through his educational programmes, research and innovation, large-scale research registries, and advocacy for public health policy changes. He is an incredibly humble and generous leader, and his patients and community are the source of his unending motivation.

We analyze the factors that increase the likelihood that other nations will follow China's global economic leadership. While our theoretical framework incorporates the conventional argument that China pulls in followers with economic benefits, we focus on grievances with the current global order that have the effect of pushing countries toward the rising new leader. We find that grievances about global financial instability are particularly important push factors. Our results show that countries that have experienced more financial crises, more variable capital account policies, more volatile portfolio capital outflows, and more social unrest during IMF programs are more likely to support China's global leadership than leaders of nations that have been less exposed to these problems. We find no evidence that grievances about global governance, or grievances about discriminatory US trade policies, are related to foreign support for China's global economic leadership. Overall, our evidence is consistent with the interpretation that leaders want to reform and preserve the WTO and the IMF, which have worked reasonably well for them under US leadership. At the same time, they have incentives to follow China's economic leadership on global capital flows, emphasizing long-term infrastructure and development finance over short-term flows which, under the current order, have imposed large costs on many economies.

This study investigates the universality of transformational leadership with respect to employee perceptions and three outcomes: job satisfaction, self-rated health, and well-being. We do so among employees of different national and cultural backgrounds, yet within a shared national and sectorial setting. Our study has a repeated measures design based on survey data from 2,947 employees (2,836 natives Danes and 111 immigrants) in the Danish elder care sector. While we find no difference between native Danes and immigrants in their perception of transformational leadership, we find that transformational leadership is not a universal predictor of outcomes. Although transformational leadership predicts change in none of the outcomes for immigrants, it does predict change in job satisfaction and well-being for native Danes. Based on our findings, we suggest applying a combination of universalistic and contingency paradigms when leading composite employee groups.