Leadership Styles & Qualities in Healthcare Field

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Leadership Qualities
Ethical Leadership
Soft Skills
Leadership Styles
Leadership Models
References

Introduction

To understand the differences between leadership and management, an individual should consider his own experience with the terms.

The concept of leadership always includes one individuals influence on a person or a group of people.
The influence could occur as a sequence of multiple aspects that include trust, care, and inspiration.
The leader does not necessarily use his power to command his followers, he becomes a leader for earning the followers trust, showing how much he cares for the followers, or simply inspiring the group.

On the other hand, management is a collection of skills used to organize activities within an organization or company in an effective way. There are several differences between leadership and management: in terms of coexisting, management could function without leadership, while leading could not exist without managing (Portolese et al., 2018). In terms of scale, leadership paints the future picture and determines long-term plans; management controls daily tasks and short-term targets. A leader leads people, meaning that leadership is more people-oriented, while a manager manages objects and tasks and orients people on task completion. In the same way, managers pursue a goal of attaining effectiveness from the employees, while leaders focus more on building effective teams. Managers follow fast tier-based relationships to set objectives and goals for employees, while leaders use leader-follower connections to ensure long-term cooperation.

Leadership Qualities

To describe specific leadership qualities that are essential for the field of healthcare, one should address the widely accepted model of the big Five Personality Traits introduced by Goldberg (Bauer et al., 2016). The model rates an individual according to five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each of the traits could be adapted to paint a portrait of a perfect leader for Winter Valley Hospital:

Openness stands for an individuals willingness to have new experiences. The leader should be open to decisions like improving the current system of job roles and duties and their distribution while also being objective to address the employees complaints about favoritism towards certain employees.
Conscientiousness implies an individuals ability to take the initiative and be capable of organizing the working process. The leader of the Winter Valley Hospital needs to lead by example and follow the actions they recommend the employees to follow, improving the issue with different timing of employees notice on organizational changes, identified by the employees complaints.
Extraversion is related to leadership as extraverts are most likely to make meaningful connections. The leader should value the employees work, show respect to colleagues, and understand where they are coming from as individuals. The extravasation aspect also implies fixing the issue with lack of feedback, identified by employees complaints.
Agreeableness speaks to the leaders ability to avoid conflicts while also protecting his point of view. As one of the employees complained that the employees do not have precise duty boundaries, the leader should solve the problem with the power of authority and not give the issue a chance to result in an embroilment.
Lastly, the neuroticism aspect implements the leaders ability to control his emotions and not show his temperament. Some employees complained that they do not feel motivated and feel that they are doing significantly more than their colleagues. It is the leaders duty, in this case, to keep the employees motivated by stating the organizational mission.

Ethical Leadership

Ethics and ethical leadership play a significant role in organizational process and organizational efficiency. The concept of organizational ethics includes the leadership and the trust aspects. The management and leaders build trust based on ethics that is connected to the employees motivation (Bauer et al., 2016). Ethics are shown in the decision-making process, precisely in assessing the situation, considering all points of view within an organization, taking an insight into possible consequences, and monitoring the outcomes.

Ethical leadership implements trust between managers and employees and is proved to be connected to the employees motivation. With good ethical leadership, the problem of low levels of morale and work engagement identified by the employees complaints would be solved. Moreover, as one of the core principles of ethical leadership is considering all points of view within the organization, the issue of favoritism toward specific employees, reported in one of the complaints could be solved. When the issue of favoritism would be gone, more popular tasks would be distributed across all employees, which was one of the employees concerns. The trust aspect of ethical leadership would also reduce the extra leniency provided to separate employees and replace it with a trust-based approach.

Soft Skills

As a significant part of healthcare workers face workplace incivility, it is important to use certain skills to provide effective communication with patients and employees. The soft skills include the skill of conflict management essential for the healthcare field, as the field provides services in cases of emergencies and involves professional ethics (Hahn & Popan, 2020). The soft skills address the leaders emotional intelligence, ability to manage stress, good listening ability, and overall empathy (Portolese et al., 2018). In the case of Winter Valley Hospital, soft skills could be used to mentor the employees and increase motivation.

First, the employees complaints showed a lack of feedback on employees performance and identified the need to show the employees ways to improve their performance. As soft skills could be used to communicate with employees effectively, soft skills would help give feedback to employees and provide them with advice on how to improve their productivity. Moreover, as one of the complaints from the employees addressed the issue that the leadership lacks respect for the employees and does not care about the employees as individuals, soft skills could solve the issue. In this case, soft skills would help the managers to approach the employee as an individual and express interest in their personality and lifestyle through small talks.

Leadership Styles

There are several different leadership styles/models, but not every leadership style is appropriate for the healthcare field. Some of the key styles widely used to engage and motivate employees are:

Autocratic Leadership Model, where the leader makes all decisions and supervises the process closely through coercive motivation, implying that there is no input from the employees.
Charismatic Leadership Model, where the leader is perceived as a figure of inspiration. The motivation used in this model is described as inspirational and relates to transformational leadership rather than transactional leadership.
Democratic/Participative Leadership style, in which the leader encourages the employees to participate in making the decisions. This leadership style implies the election of representatives from units that could participate in the decision-making process on par with management. This leadership model is more suitable for Winter Valley Hospital as employees tend to show a high level of motivation and contribution to the organizational goals.
Inspirational Leadership style, where the leader develops enthusiasm among employees by connecting their own personal goals to the organizational mission.
To address the employees complaints, managers at Winter Valley Hospital need to choose one Leadership style that would suit the majority of criteria.
Autocratic leadership is not applicable for the case as the employees already experience pressure from management with the absence of respect and clear favoritism.
Charismatic leadership could be used to inspire employees and increase work engagement. Despite fixing the employees low morale and the absence of leadership that leads by example, It would not solve the issue of employees being notified about organizational changes at different times. Moreover, the application of charismatic leadership would not solve the problem in the absence of a clear definition of job roles and duties.
The same critiques apply to the inspirational leadership style; although it could fix some of the motivation and engagement problems, there still would be organizational issues that would need more work.
The most suitable leadership style in the case of Winter Valley Hospital is the Democratic/Participative Leadership Style. The implication of this leadership style would address all of the employees concerns. As every employee would be able to participate in organizational changes directly or through the representatives, the organizational issues identified in complaints with different notifications about upcoming events would be fixed. Favoritism was reported in one of the employees complaints, and lack of respect from the managers, identified in another complaint, would be eliminated with the application of a democratic leadership style.
As participation in organizational changes is connected to employees satisfaction with the job, the employees concerns with low morale, engagement, and productivity identified in employees complaints would be solved through the application of democratic leadership.

Leadership Models

Lewins Change model is a three-stage model of planned change. According to the model, organizational change has its own beginning, middle, and end. The use of the model implies employees preparation for the change, implementation of the change, and ending stage, where the new behavioral patterns become permanent (Bauer et al., 2016). Lewins model acknowledged that the major significance of the changes depended on the preparation of employees for the changes and required the change to reflect five valid points. The points included notification of employees of upcoming changes, developing a sense of urgency, and building a coalition with the opinion leaders. The other points include providing the employees with support from management and allowing employees to participate in the change as the studies showed that participation in changes develops a more positive attitude towards changes (Bauer et al., 2016).
Unlike Lewins three-stage model of planned change, the positive model counts five stages. The main concept of the model is to not concentrate on the disadvantages of the organization but on the positives or what the organization is doing right and how it could be improved to lead the organization to new heights. The model uses the principle of appreciative inquiry that implies positive value orientation into analysis and organizational changes. The five stages of the positive model include initiating the inquiry at first, inquiring into best practices through the form of interviews, and using the interviews to discover themes for stories of innovation. Then, the management forms a vision of the preferred future.

With a combination of the Democratic Leadership style and Lewins change model, the management of the Winter Valley Hospital would be able to solve the issues with notification of employees about upcoming changes identified through employees complaints. Moreover, the implication of the change model would address the employees complaints about the absence of respect, support, and feedback from the management. As two of the employees complaints showed concerns about the low levels of morale and engagement among employees, allowing the employees to participate in the changes would help to lift the level of morale and engagement.

References

Bauer, T., Erdogan, B., Short, J., & Carpenter, M. A. (2016). Principles of management Version 3.0. FlatWorld.

Hahn, A., & Popan, E. (2020). Professional ethics. Salem Press Encyclopedia.

Portolese, L., Upperman, P., & Trumpy, B. (2018). The art of leadership and supervision Version 1.1. FlatWorld.

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