Contemporary Healthcare Leadership Style

How can we ensure that effective healthcare leadership is incorporated in today’s organization? While continued reports exist of organizations struggling to stay afloat, research has indicated that healthcare organizations are lacking in effective styles of leaderships. With fast approaching changes with mergers and acquisitions, many healthcare organizations have chosen to restructure their facilities to accommodate the rapid growth in the industries crisis of inadequate leadership in organizations. In fact, numerous reports have surfaced depicting growing needs for organizations to change their current leader’s roles to help improve the potential success of developing effective leadership.

This essay will first consider the different leadership theories and the evidence that supports those theories within healthcare practice. Highlighting how these theories can enhance patient experience whilst promoting a transparent open culture to healthcare, linking leadership and decision making to a patient scenario experienced by the author. It will then go on to describe the differences between behavioural, trait, transformational leadership models researching the positive and negatives of the theories from a range of academic sources. The third part looks at the importance of clinical decision making in the practice setting, encompassing when and who is responsible for making decision in a healthcare setting (Haycock-Stuart, E and

The world needs leaders to lead by example. The health care field needs leaders to promote what is the right things to do in healthcare thus enhance the productivity of care delivery in a qualifying cost-effective way. Leaders are skilled with brilliance, innovation for change and possess the vision to determine what needs to be done as well as empower people to strive for change and promote a healthier system for that which is of concern. Transformational style leaders are preferred in the new design of healthcare delivery systems today. Transformational Leadership inspires followers and acts as role models, creating acceptance of the mission and purpose of the team (as cited in Lievens, & Vlerick, 2014).

A successful and societally beneficial healthcare organization must have a leader who has a sense of right and wrong, exhibits restraint, dispenses wisdom, and is a visionary that guides the organization to reach its maximum potential. The role of a successful leader is dependent upon employees that embrace the organization’s culture, mission, and direction. An effective leader rallies employee support and allegiance to the organization’s cause. An influential leader can elicit employee positivity and dedication, and has the ability to engage employees in achieving goals set forth by the organization and leadership.

With the many challenges healthcare leaders face, it is important for leaders to develop many different leadership styles to accomplish the organizations mission and ensure organizational success. In my organization, this has required the adoption of the situational leadership approach, where effective leaders adapt their leadership style to manage particular situations (Giltinane, 2013, p. 38).

Upon completion of my leadership self-assessment. It was determined by a strong indicator of 40 points, that I am a Participative Style leader. My second place scoring of 31 was in the Delagative, (laissez-fair) style of leadership. Coming in last was the authoritarian leader. The type of leadership style that I exhibit is also known as a democratic leader. A democratic leader is known for being very people oriented. The democratic leader encourages input from their peers, and does so with an open-mind. Often decisions under this leadership seem to occur at a much slower pace, (due to taking the time to listen to

Authoritative leaders use the “command and control” method. It is one of the least popular leadership styles. This style of leadership involves one leader and the rest

Leadership is described as the behavior of an individual when directing the activities of a group toward a shared goal. Leadership theory is dynamic and continues to change over time. Truman in1958 described the leader as a person who can enforce the staff to do what they do not desire to do (Azar & Asiabar, 2014). Leadership in the healthcare systems consists of numerous professional groups, departments, and specialties, which involved elaborate and nonlinear interactions between the professional. In order to provide an effective leadership, it should be focus on the dynamic relationship between leadership values, culture, capabilities and the organizational context (Al-Sawai, 2013).

This paper is to define the definition of leadership, and how its breakdown of various leadership styles and theories. I will also focus on more than one leadership style on what is to believe the best aligns thoughts of what leadership should mean. The leadership style is a mixed character of leadership that combines the transformational and servant leadership theories in to Healthcare. An evaluation is made of the learner’s leadership characteristics and how they would enable the learner to better serve his community of professionals. The paper will also identify and evaluated the tenets of ethical leadership as well as those of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Manohar (2011) describes this approach to leadership as somewhat authoritarian. This leader has a specific goal in mind and directs the team in accomplishing the plan the manager has already put into action. The leader is in complete control of all the requirements and in charge of the outcome. The team has assigned roles and responsibilities and these tasks may or may not mirror their desires or expertise. In the end this leader has the final say and rarely asks for suggestions from the group in making a hard line decision (p. 1). Robbins & Judge (2011) refers to this as a manager’s inherent right to set boundaries and expect their subordinates to obey them.

Democratic Leadership is the leadership style that promotes the sharing of responsibility, the exercise of delegation and continual consultation. The style has the following characteristics:

There are several leadership styles. This refers to the behaviors that the leaders have. They include autocratic leadership, where the leader acts as a dictator. The leader makes all the decisions by him or herself and does not allow any decisions or advice from the subordinates. The democratic leadership style is where everybody has a say which can then be included into the final decision made. Laissez-faire style which is also called the free rein style is where the leader gives freedom to the subordinates. The subordinates are allowed to make their own methods and policies.

Democratic leadership style has a large amount of creative ideas at its disposal due to large and diverse input of ideas by various members of the organization. Thus democratic leadership has an advantage of generating better ideas and creative solutions to the problems of the organization. There is a satisfaction among the employees of being more involved with the process, which leads to better productivity in the organization.

Democratic style of leadership ideas have the ability to move more freely throughout the organization. Team are willing to openly discuss the ideas and the different concepts. In this type of technological environment Democratic style is in my belief the most efficient style available. In this type of leadership every employee’s opinion is up for consideration.

The employees are given a say on what goes on and power is distributed equally. Studies shown in groups run by this style, the work output was less but the quality of the work was higher. The democratic leadership style helps team members feel valued, creates balanced, and has more in common with modern day governments.