Leadership in Healthcare - Paper Sample

Introduction

Leadership has a significant influence on the performance of the organizational team. Leaders play a role in creating and handling effective teams. Team leadership entails various challenges and opportunities that have to be addressed, ranging from the design, methods, and leadership forms. The article, "Team leadership" by Zaccaro et al. (2001) focuses on the leader-team dynamic basing on the lens of functional leadership. According to Zaccaro et al. (2001), leaders have a job to do, including handling the organizational teams in terms of their needs. The article explores the functional leadership approach basing on various leadership dimensions that relate to team effectiveness. It also examines various guidelines while considering the factors that influence leadership and the team processes that influence the style of leadership. This paper explores the specific leadership style while examining how this style is applied in the healthcare environment. The paper examines the effective implementation of the healthcare facility's leadership style and how the style fits me personally.

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Leadership Style

The leadership style investigated in the research article is the functional leadership approach. The style addresses the relationship between the leader and the team. According to Zaccaro et al. (2001), the functional leadership approach is a social problem-solving style of leadership that plays a role in diagnosing problems that could impede the attainment of organizational goals. The leadership style also generates and plans appropriate solutions while ensuring effective implementation of the solutions within the complex social domains. Besides, Zaccaro et al. (2001) argued that the functional leadership approach provides the discretion and choice for appropriate solutions in a particular domain.

Healthcare Environment

The functional leadership approach emphasizes the linkage between teams and the environment, given the fact that most of the problems affecting the team originate from the environment. Therefore, this style can be applied effectively in the health care environment, with the leaders having the responsibility of interpreting and defining the events for their team. The functional leadership style emphasizes effective leadership processes in the health care environment that would contribute to effective group performance. It is dictated by the performance requirements in the health care environment and the properties and attributes of the team. The functional leadership style has various contextual imperatives that drive leadership in the health care environment ranging from cognitive to social and technological, financial, and staffing. The imperatives are instrumental for the health care organization's success as they define the leadership responses while enhancing the efficacy of the leadership actions. The functional leadership in the health care environment explains the members' capabilities and skills while ensuring team effectiveness. Through effective team composition in the health care environment, the organization appropriately mitigates the constraints that might result in team failure. Through the functional leadership theory, this is possible as the circumstances are prescribed based on necessary leadership activities for the organization's success while negating the utility of other activities.

Implementation

Implementing a functional leadership style in health care organizations entails effective follow-through, which is difficult, costly, and complex (Day et al., 2006). However, its practical implementation entails examining the team leadership at a team level while sampling various teams to provide statistical power essential to addressing the various challenges. The implementation also requires effective measures that capture the cognitive, behavioral, and affective processes involved in team leadership. Since implementing this process is not easy, there is a need to assess, diagnose, and understand team leadership composition and the strategies to implement in improving the organizational metrics. Besides, there is a need to study team leadership in the healthcare environment. Since team composition and team type may vary from department to another, the organization has to study the social context of leadership associated with the individuals working in a broader organizational context. The organizational context is intense, dynamic, and multifaceted communication independent, it shapes the team, thus impacting the organization's management practice.

Conclusion

In the article on team leadership, the fundamental components of effective team leadership are explored based on how the functional leadership style can be implemented in the health care environment. The functional leadership approach entails both leadership and team dynamics, which have been revealed throughout this paper. The style involves the conceptual framework of how the leaders systematically contribute to the team basing on their responsibilities to influence the leader's effectiveness. The style is essential as it is used in problem-solving with an adequate understanding of the decision making approaches and performance.

References

Day, D. V., Gronn, P., & Salas, E. (2006). Leadership in team-based organizations: On the threshold of a new era. Leadership Quarterly, 17(3), 211–216.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.02.001

Zaccaro, S. J., Rittman, A. L., & Marks, M. A. (2001). Team leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 12(4), 451–483. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(01)00093-5.