Leadership Styles in Healthcare

Leadership Styles in Healthcare

Hello, and welcome to this presentation about leadership styles in healthcare. This presentation has been designed to explore the various leadership styles and the most effective approaches in the healthcare setting.

We will start by defining leadership styles and explaining why it is essential for healthcare leaders to understand their leadership styles. We shall then outline the leadership skills and behaviors necessary to leverage diversity, foster inclusion, and ensure professionalism and professional responsibility. We will also examine different leadership styles, describe two that would be especially effective in a healthcare setting, and explain why. We shall highlight the advantages and challenges of each leadership style. Lastly, we shall explain how personal, organizational, societal, multicultural, and global norms and values impact leadership styles.

To understand leadership styles, one must understand what leadership is all about. According to Durmuş (2020), leadership refers to a multidimensional process in which a person motivates other people to develop their skills and direct their activities towards achieving the goals that the person has helped set. A leader sets goals, influences group members, and directs them toward achieving them. Leaders adopt various styles to influence, direct, and guide their group members toward achieving the set goals. According to Demirtas & Karaca (2020), leaders must possess specific characteristics to influence others, as trait theory portrays. This description leads to the definition of leadership style as a characteristic behavior of a leader when they direct, motivate, guide, and manage groups of people. Therefore, how a person behaves as a leader refers to their leadership style.

According to Serpil & Durmus (2020), understanding leadership style in the healthcare setting is essential in determining the suitable style for staff satisfaction. Since the staff are directly linked with patients and caregivers, their satisfaction would determine their effectiveness in delivering quality health care to patients and their caregivers. Moreover, there are specific styles that are more effective in a healthcare setting, such as relational leadership styles, which have been associated with organizational commitment, enhanced staff health welfare, increase in productivity, positive patient outcomes, compelling healthcare study, reduction of stress, and job satisfaction (Durmus, 2020). This is because relational leadership styles focus on relationships and people, and healthcare is about people and relationships with colleagues, patients, caregivers, patients’ families, and society. Therefore, understanding the suitable leadership styles plays an essential part in affecting all these stakeholders in the healthcare field.

Emotional intelligence has increasingly become one of the most desired qualities in the leadership role, especially in the healthcare field. Trait theory highlights various traits that an effective leader must possess, including maturity, integrity, success motivation, and intelligence. According to Demirtas & Karaca (2020), emotionally intelligent leaders possess various desirable qualities. This is because an emotionally intelligent person is also equipped with social skills, empathy, motivation, self-regulation, and self-awareness (Demirtas & Karaca, 2020). This means an emotionally intelligent person would also be sensitive to other people’s needs, opinions, preferences, and cultural diversity. This skill is essential in ensuring inclusivity and diversity in a healthcare institution.

Additionally, because emotional intelligence has these traits, they are likely to learn from others. This leads to another skill deemed necessary in the field: listening. To address a patient’s needs and concerns, a nurse must listen actively to diagnose and prescribe medication effectively. Otherwise, this would affect the health outcomes negatively. Listening should, therefore, start from the leadership level. Healthcare, by its nature, is about dealing with matters of morality and issues of life and death (AdventHealth University, 2020). As such, healthcare demands that professionals follow the highest ethical standards. In this case, having integrity is required in setting the moral tone for the employees and other stakeholders in the field. Moreover, leading a staff into a desired future needs goal setting, preparation, and a clear vision for a leader to be deemed successful and with professional responsibility. Lastly, since the healthcare system is constantly changing, a leader has to be adaptable and lead other professionals to the changing needs within the healthcare system.

Relational leadership styles involve leadership styles focused on relationships and people and include participatory leadership, resonance, emotional intelligence, and transformational leadership (Durmuş & Kirca, 2019). Transformational leadership entails empowering staff members to initiate changes that can lead to the transformation of an organization for the better. It is based on the belief that everyone, irrespective of their job description, can exhibit leadership (AdventHealth University, 2020). In a participatory leadership style, innovation, skills, experience, and knowledge are essential in the decision-making process, with a more extensive range of expertise and participation in engagement. The emotional intelligence leadership style entails sensitivity to the emotional health of self and others, well-being, emotions, and development of effective personal relations while directing followers to the business’s expected goals (Durmuş & Kirca, 2019). Resonance leadership style is mainly based on emotional intelligence and awareness, entailing being sensitive and open to judgment. This means that resonance leaders have emotional intelligence characteristics.

Another category of leadership style is the task-focused leadership style. This style entails planning business activities, clarifying roles in a team, setting objectives, and constantly monitoring performance and processes (Durmuş & Kirca, 2019). The transactional leadership style is considered a task-focused leadership style. This is because it provides medium-term goals and motivates the viewers via fulfilling personal needs in exchange for solid performance toward achieving the goals of an organization (Durmuş & Kirca, 2019). This means that the performance of the team followers is being monitored and corrected where necessary, and their rewards are conditional. This implies that the team followers will be rewarded if the desired tasks are satisfactorily fulfilled. In the Laissez-faire leadership style, the leader recognizes complete freedom, gives little or no control or orientation, and prefers a practical approach (Kelly & Hearld, 2020). In an instrumental leadership style, the leader chooses an appropriate approach and resources to achieve organizational goals. In this case, jobs are carried out regarding the organization’s resources, time constraints, and strategic vision.

According to Kelly & Herald (2020), transformational leadership entails individualized consideration, idealized influence, inspirational motivation, and intellectual stimulation. Sfantou et al. (2017) found that transformational leadership was associated with reduced burnout. It was found that transformational leadership increases the organizational culture of the nursing unit and structural empowerment. In turn, this impacts the organizational commitment of nurses, which leads to higher job satisfaction levels, positive health outcomes, overall safety climate, patient safety, nursing retention, and higher productivity (Sfantou et al., 2017). Moreover, change management is significant for healthcare management (Samarakoon, 2019). Since healthcare is often changing, managing change is essential for effective and quality health outcomes. Transformational leadership would be helpful in this case, which is why it is suitable for healthcare settings.

Most transactional leaders are closed-minded, power-oriented, controlling, and directive. They describe the tasks’ how, why, when, and what, emphasizing compliance and strict adherence, loyalty, and obedience to the rules (Durmuş & Kirca, 2019). Those who comply are rewarded, and those who do not are punished. This style is effective in the healthcare setting because many ethical and moral issues about life and death characterize the healthcare setting. Therefore, adherence to specific standards and rules is necessary to avoid compromising the well-being of patients, colleagues, and society. Besides, Sfantou et al. (2017) found increased patient satisfaction in homecare and acute care settings due to the transactional leadership style. However, the disadvantage of this style is that followers do not like it. Yet, it is compelling in patient outcomes. Followers are more effective when this leadership style is applied.

Organizational culture refers to shared perceptions, beliefs, and values held by the workers in an organization (Tsai, 2011). Since organizational culture reflects the behavioral norms, beliefs, and values used by workers in an organization to give meaning to the circumstances they encounter, it can, therefore, influence the behavior and attitudes of the staff members. Leaders who understand the organization’s core values can prevent imminent internal conflict and strive to use leadership styles that would engage the employees to avoid conflicts, such as the participatory leadership style. Moreover, leaders concerned about things going wrong are often meticulous in their work and personal lives. They, therefore, tend to employ leadership styles that would avoid the negative implications of projects. In this case, they will likely employ styles that portray vision, goal-setting, and adhering to essential structures and influence others to take an active role to avoid negative impacts. Such leaders may tend to employ transformational leadership styles. Some leaders from high-context communication cultures are likely to employ leadership styles that are more practical than words (Tsai, 2011). Also, suppose a leader is caring and supportive. In that case, they are likely to reflect these qualities in their leadership styles so that other people are not negatively affected by their leadership. They often use relational and transactional leadership styles to achieve an outcome that would benefit most people. Lastly, suppose global healthcare initiatives show empirical evidence that specific strategies are effective. In that case, the healthcare system will likely employ these strategies because the healthcare field is constantly changing due to changing needs, concerns, and technological advancement.

I will likely say that various research studies have shown that leadership styles are life-changing healthcare outcomes. Some styles work best under specific healthcare units and not others. However, research studies such as Sfantou et al. (2017) have proved that transformational and transactional leadership styles lead to positive patient outcomes, satisfaction, and healthcare outcomes. However, there is a need to build on this research regarding other leadership styles so that the gap can be filled and healthcare leaders can understand the appropriate style to use in every situation.

Advent Health University (2020). 5 Types of Leadership Styles in Healthcare. Retrieved 18/10/2021 from https://online.ahu.edu/blog/leadership-styles-in-healthcare/

Demirtas, O. & Karaca, M. (2020). A Handbook of Leadership Styles. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Durmuş, S. Ç. (Ed.). (2020). Nursing: New Perspectives. BoD–Books on Demand.

Durmuş, S. Ç., & Kırca, K. (2019). Leadership Styles in Nursing. In Nursing-New Perspectives. IntechOpen.

Kelly, R. J., & Hearld, L. R. (2020). Burnout and leadership style in behavioral health care: A literature review. The journal of behavioral health services & research, 1.

Samarakoon, K.B. (2019). Leadership Styles for Healthcare. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 9, Issue 9. ISSN 2250-3153

Sfantou, D. F., Laliotis, A., Patelarou, A. E., Sifaki-Pistolla, D., Matalliotakis, M., & Patelarou, E. (2017, December). A systematic review of the importance of leadership style towards quality of care measures in healthcare settings. In Healthcare (Vol. 5, No. 4, p. 73). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.

Tsai, Y. (2011). Relationship between organizational culture, leadership behavior, and job satisfaction. BMC health services research, 11(1), 1-9.

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For this assignment, explore the different types of leadership styles. In a 10-12-slide PowerPoint, discuss the most effective approaches for a healthcare setting and why. For the presentation of your PowerPoint, use Loom to create a voice-over or a video. Refer to the Topic Materials for additional guidance on recording your presentation with Loom. Include an additional slide for the Title page, Loom link (at the beginning), and an additional slide for References at the end.

Leadership Styles in Healthcare

Define leadership style and explain why it is essential for healthcare leaders to understand their leadership style.
Outline the leadership skills and behaviors necessary to leverage diversity, foster inclusion, and ensure professionalism and professional responsibility.
Examine different leadership styles. Describe two leadership styles that would be especially effective in a healthcare setting and explain why. Discuss the advantages and challenges of each of these leadership styles.
Explain how personal, organizational, societal, multicultural, and global norms and values impact leadership styles.
A minimum of three academic references from credible sources are required for this assignment.

While APA style is not required for the body of this assignment, solid academic writing is expected, and documentation of sources should be presented using APA formatting guidelines, which can be found in the APA Style Guide in the Student Success Center.

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Benchmark Information

This benchmark assignment assesses the following programmatic competency:

BS Health Sciences

4.4: Identify how personal, organizational, societal, multicultural, and global norms and values impact various leadership styles.