Transformational Leadership and its Effect in Healthcare Organizations

Health care environment is constantly changing with the implementation of health reforms, adoption of health information technology and greater emphasis on disease prevention and health promotion. In the presence of such demands, the role of leaders in health care organizations determines the success of the health care institution. Hence, the presence of appropriate leadership style and motivation capabilities is necessary for leaders to handle complex work process in hospital setting (Ginter, Duncan & Swayne, (2018). This paper provides an insight into the leadership style and capabilities of Tracey Moyer, a director of Cutis Care LLC South west region by analyzing the interview response of the leader.

CutisCare, LLC mainly provides wound care services such as compression therapy, topical treatments, negative pressure wound therapy and many other wound care related treatments in USA. After reviewing Tracey Moyer’s response from the interview, it has been found that she has used her transformational leadership style to help CutisCare achieve high quality care benchmark. This was identified when she was asked what leadership style she follows to encourage her employees to perform. Tracy responded that she assesses every employee’s strength and weakness and use their skills accordingly to ensure that each wound healing center reach their maximum potential.

The leadership trait exhibited by Tracy is similar to that of transformation leadership theory as the theory states that leadership is exhibited when a leader interacts with others to create strong relationship and use their inspirational nature and charismatic personalities to transform their followers (Rolfe, 2011). Hence, such leaders focus on identifying changes needed in an employee and implementing strategies to improve their job performance. This approach helped Tracy to effectively utilize the strength of each employee and work on their weak points to bring valuable and positive changes in employees. Transformational leadership style is demanded in health care organization as such leaders possess the right skills to adapt to changes in health care environment and develop desired competencies in their employees (Munir et al., 2012).

When Tracy was asked what strategies she takes to motivate her employees, she had responded that she is in charge of a large and diverse group of staffs, she had mainly tried to empower and motivate her employees by rewarding them for their performance and creating a flexible workforce. Leadership is often linked with motivations role as leader’s action to motivate employees creates the pathway for a motivated workforce and this in turn contributes to the success of organization (Low, 2018). The analysis of interview response also reflected that Tracy’s ultimate desire was also to motivate their employees to perform. Hence, motivational strategies like effective reward system and appreciation of staff’s work acts as a form of extrinsic motivation for followers. Evidence has shown strong fit between transaction leadership and extrinsic motivation as both are based on same concept of empowering followers (Wang, Kim & Lee, 2016).. Extrinsic motivation strategies like rewards have been found to be an effective way to boost employee performance. Secondly, motivational strategies like empowering workers by redesigning jobs and providing them flexibility in work influence’s employee’s will to perform and achieve the set goals of the organization (Cerasoli, Nicklin & Ford, 2014). Hence, it can be said that motivational strategies implemented by Tracey played a role in creating a positive and productive workforce.

Motivational Strategies in the Healthcare Environment

The pace of work in any health care organization is often hindered due to organizational issues or cultural issues. In this situation, leader’s management skills determine the way in which they can successfully handle different issues like that of workforce shortage or any patient-staff conflict (Burke, 2017). Tracy’s response regarding the approach she takes to address organization issues revealed that she played a role in addressing organizational issues by making it mandatory to conduct an annual performance review. Before Tracy joined CutisCare, no annual performance review was done. However, the process of implementing annual reviews and the proposal of pay raise for employees getting good reviews was a good leadership strategy to minimize staff conflict and enhance performance. Leaders often expected to address workforce shortages and challenges in dealing with complex patient cases. Hence, leader’s can use their decision making and judgment skills to develop an organizational environment that encourages employee to take up task burden and embrace challenging task too (Taplin, Foster & Shortell, 2013).

 By implementing performance review, Tracy positively influenced the work culture of Cutis Care and thus cultivated an environment for safety of patient. The implementation of performance review and strategies like rewards had great impact on employee’s self-confidence and their motivation to perform. The extrinsic motivation strategy played a role in encouraging staffs at Cutis Care to work harder. This kind of insight helped Tracy to meet all the goals she had set for each center.

Tracy was asked regarding the positive and negative results that she had got so far due to her style of leading at the Cutis Care center. She responded that positive outcome of her leadership was that many people were eligible for salary raise. However, the negative point was that that many were working hard, but could not get a good raise. This might be due to certain shortcoming. However, a health care leader should always attempt to contemplate on their past actions and find out mistakes or shortcomings that need to be addressed in the future.

A health care leader should have a vision to take the organization to new heights. They can do so by regularly review the success or failure of past strategies (Shiozaki, 2016). Since Tracy’s step towards introducing performance review was the most successful organizational outcome, she can strive to yield more positive results in the future by taking other innovative steps. In her interview, Tracy revealed that her next step was to create a leadership mentor program so that other employees can step into higher roles and understand their responsibilities when they reach the next level. This plan of Tracy is a commendable step as it implies her focus on building a responsible and confident workforce.

Conclusion:

The analysis of interview answer with Tracy, the director of Cutis Care with the support from leadership theories gave important insight into the impact of leadership style on organizational excellence. The transformational leadership style exhibited by Tracy is a perfect example to portray how leaders can encourage their employees to perform and achieve core organizational objectives. Transformational leadership is found to be most effective in building relationship with employee, empowering them and boosting their performance.

References:

Burke, W. W. (2017). Organization change: Theory and practice. Sage Publications.

Cerasoli, C. P., Nicklin, J. M., & Ford, M. T. (2014). Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives jointly predict performance: A 40-year meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin, 140(4), 980.

Ginter, P. M., Duncan, J., & Swayne, L. E. (2018). The Strategic Management of Healthcare Organizations. John Wiley & Sons.

Low, K. C. P. (2018). Leadership and Motivation. In Leading Successfully in Asia (pp. 39-80). Springer, Cham.

Munir, F., Nielsen, K., Garde, A. H., Albertsen, K., & Carneiro, I. G. (2012). Mediating the effects of work–life conflict between transformational leadership and health?care workers’ job satisfaction and psychological wellbeing. Journal of Nursing Management, 20(4), 512-521.

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Taplin, S. H., Foster, M. K., & Shortell, S. M. (2013). Organizational leadership for building effective health care teams. The Annals of Family Medicine, 11(3), 279-281.

Wang, X. H. F., Kim, T. Y., & Lee, D. R. (2016). Cognitive diversity and team creativity: Effects of team intrinsic motivation and transformational leadership. Journal of Business Research, 69(9), 3231-3239.