Leadership Culture in a Healthcare Organization

Culture delineates the behavioral customs, mutual practices, common outlooks and beliefs that dictate any organization. The leadership culture of an organization is a distinctive and potent aspect of its organizational culture. Leaders can be considered to be the cultural designers and planners of any organization. In the end, an entity embraces and espouses the individualities and priorities of its leaders. Forming a culture of leadership is a fundamental constituent of an organization's capacity to grow and progress year over year. This is not an element that can be executed at once. Instead, a culture of leadership advances gradually by undertaking the essential steps and investing time and resources that are needed to form leaders not just at the highest levels of organizations, but also all over the organization (Schein, 2006). Leadership culture can be outlined as the system of time and again unspoken customs, standards and suppositions that act as guiding principles and direct the manner in which managers take leadership in a given organization. The behavior of leaders make up approximately forty to sixty percent of organizational culture. Their behavior are the fundamental factor in influencing leadership culture (Read, 2015).

There are various conditions and components within the organization that are essential in developing a leadership culture. One of the key conditions is having a mission, vision and values. Adaptation of the organizational mission, values and the core strategies is an imperative objective for leadership development. In particular, leaders and their cultural influences model, support, and promote alignment with the organization. In turn, they become ready to create placement prospects for managers, teams and employees to bring into line and develop commitment (Read, 2015). A second element takes into account building the leadership culture into the hiring process and practice. It is imperative for leaders to not only dedicate themselves to new leadership responsibilities, but it also ought to be mirrored in the process of recruitment and hiring. This implies enlisting and employing individuals that fit within the organization's culture of leadership capability. Third, accountability should be fabricated into leadership improvement. In order for a culture of leadership to exist, it is imperative for leaders to ensure leadership development and improvement is a vital element of progression. This encompasses properly delineating goals and objectives that are to be attained at every level and department of the organization (Schein, 2006).

Leadership culture significantly influences the organizational climate, which encompasses the mutual perspectives of organizational aspects such as decision making and customs and norms regarding work activities. Therefore, leaders, through the culture they instigate within the organization can generate a setting of continuous improvement in quality and safety (Tsai, 2011). Leadership supports and nurtures a culture of safety and continual learning and improvement. In particular, this is a setting that makes certain patients are always at the heart of health care planning and delivery. The personnel are supported to render health care and thus purpose to provide safe, efficacious and compassionate care. Another way in which they are able to achieve this is by fashioning culture, generating the conditions and modeling the behavior essential for quality to prosper (Health Service Executive, 2016).

Top leaders have a considerable impact on the culture of safety and continuous improvement in a health care organization through strategic initiatives. One particular way is by means of direct interrelations with frontline employees. A good example is leadership walk arounds. This takes into account regular visits by managers to the various clinical units or departments within the healthcare organization so as to engage with personnel in candid discussion regarding safety and improvement. This can constructively impact culture. In particular, engagement with personnel that take their time to point out any mistakes or inaccuracies, dedicating time and resources to come up with a follow through, hospital leadership can both address detailed safety issues and perceptibly exemplify the significance of patient safety as an organizational main concern (Frankel et al., 2008).

Leadership culture can also influence a healthcare setting of safety and improvement through the management of disorderly and unethical behavior by healthcare staff. Taking into consideration that executives have oversight over medical personnel, they have the capacity to make certain that unprincipled, unethical, and incompetent personnel do not put patients at risk. This also encompasses receiving prompt feedback that particular behaviors are not fitting and pose a threat to the quality of care rendered. Continuous improvement can also be instigated in the healthcare setting by ensuring that the organization is a learning entity. According to Garvin (1993), a learning organization is an entity experienced at generating, obtaining, and transferring knowledge and at transforming its behavior to mirror new knowledge and perceptions. Health care organizations pursuing to tie the gap between research and practice ought to generate a climate that facilitates and encourages invention and improvement, comprising provision of resources for novelty, stimulating regular communication across unit lines, increasing mechanisms for directing attention on fluctuating conditions, and generating structures that offer accessibility to innovation role models and counselors (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2012).

Another aspect of instituting a setting for safety and continuous development through leadership culture is empowerment of employees. The most efficacious initiatives to improve quality in health care, augment safety and also reduce costs encompasses empowering all employees. Quality improvement cannot be made possible by solely one unit within the organization but rather as a whole. Leadership culture permits the effective participation of all personnel in quality enhancement endeavors (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2012). One of the approaches includes creating a blame-free setting where the personnel feel free to report mistakes or errors devoid of being chastised or fired. Therefore, healthcare leaders should nurture a climate where all personnel feel free to recommend innovations. Effective health care leaders have to discover ways to engage the inventiveness of all of their personnel, not solely clinicians (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2012). The experience of health care organizations that have endowed personnel to employ their imagination and ingenuity is that the outcome is not merely technically efficacious projects, but also a feeling of passion and gratification amongst the staff (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2012).

Lastly, leaders have to dedicate themselves whilst instigating a setting of safety and continuous improvement. In such an environment, individuals are not simply encouraged to work toward change, but they undertake action when required. Healthcare organizations can enhance upon safety and improvement solely when leaders are perceptibly dedicated to change and when they facilitate staff to responsively share safety data and information. It is imperative to note that devoid of such a culture, healthcare personnel are more often than not disinclined to report any detrimental events and unsafe conditions owing to fear of reprisal. Leaders ought to propel the culture change by showing their own dedication to safety and constant improvement by offering the resources needed to attain outcomes (Barnsteiner, 2011). Their communication and actions towards safety and continuous improvement must be incessant and sustained. These actions inspire the rest of the staff within the organization to follow suit.

References

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (2012). Adapting Organizations for Change. Retrieved from: https://archive.ahrq.gov/hcqual/meetings/mar12/chap12.html

Barnsteiner, J. (2011). Teaching the culture of safety. The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 16(3).

Frankel, A., Grillo, S. P., Pittman, M., Thomas, E. J., Horowitz, L., Page, M., & Sexton, B. (2008). Revealing and resolving patient safety defects: the impact of leadership WalkRounds on frontline caregiver assessments of patient safety. Health services research, 43(6), 2050-2066.

Garvin, D. A. (1993). Building a Learning Organization. Harvard Business Review.

Health Service Executive. (2016). Framework for Improving Quality in our Health Service. Retrieved from: http://www.hse.ie/eng/about/Who/qualityandpatientsafety/qpsfocuson/Framework-for-Improving-Quality-2016.pdf

Read, J. M. (2015). Leadership Culture and why is it important? Linked In. Retrieved from: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-leadership-culture-why-important-dr-john-m-read

Schein, E. H. (2006). Organizational culture and leadership (Vol. 356). Hoboken: John Wiley &Sons.

Tsai, Y. (2011). Relationship between organizational culture, leadership behavior and job satisfaction. BMC health services research, 11(1), 98.