Kim Woods

Continue the Discussion and review, reflect on, and respond to one of your colleagues’ below. Explain any insights you have gained about the relationship between a leader’s interactions with subordinates and Fiedler’s Contingency Model. Then, explain how you might integrate those insights into your role as a current or future health care administration leader.

(Colleague 1) Joseph

Many current health care events can lend to applying Fiedler’s Contingency Model and put it to the task. The most widely known recent event is those surrounding the COVID19 pandemic. There are definite pressures and demands for a more standardized business structure since everything is in chaos regarding business and healthcare. Healthcare administrators are hungry for consistency at this very moment, and through consistency, we may be able to enact change, particularly in our local settings. As health care administrators and leaders, we must use systems thinking approach to evaluate the best leadership method contingent on what is happening in each of the workplaces we manage. Many health care agencies and organizations are facing staffing challenges, resources, and budget restrictions. 

In my organization, our leaders each were tasked to operate to the best of their abilities. Still, we found that leaders were being reorganized and added to newly created task groups to solve problems such as staffing, recruiting, PPE procurement, finance and billing, and other areas of operations and logistics. Leaders were tasked to work with groups based on their backgrounds and strengths to manage the groups and tasks better and more effectively. This movie reminded me of the Fiedler contingency theory because these task groups worked well and accomplished a lot in a short time, mainly because the leader was matched with the group he or she would work best with or related within the tasks at hand. 

References

Nahavandi, A. (2015). The art and science of leadership (7th ed.). Pearson.

Colleague 2 (Spencer)

One of the most recent current events that a health administrator will hear about, and likely face themselves, is the distribution of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. There are multiple angles to this current event: process, distribution prioritization, and political scrutiny over it’s effectiveness and necessity. NBC News has published a live blog to keep the nation informed of all distribution news as it is released. Specifically, one article stood out to me regarding Publix supermarkets distributing the COVID-19 vaccine in the state of Florida. It was confirmed that this is a tact of the governor to distribute the vaccine, and that “Publix will begin taking reservations on Thursday and each store will offer up to 120 doses per day” (Smith 2021).

 

In regards to Fiedler’s contingency model, a task-motivated leader will be most successful as this event unfolds. It is said that a task-motivated leader “will be more successful in high and low-control situations” (Ayman 1995). The distribution of this vaccine is absolutely a low-control situation, as it seems the delivery of specified quantities has been unreliable, as well as the unsettling expectations of the bias revolving it’s receival. The seemingly “split” ideation behind the administration of the vaccine could have a direct impact on it’s effectiveness. As COVID-19 numbers spike, a vaccine is only effective to controlling the issue if distributed properly. It will be very interesting to see how this unfolds in the near future.

 

References:

 

Ayman, R., Chemers, M. M., & Fiedler, F. (1995). The contingency model of leadership effectiveness: Its level of analysis. The Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 147–167. https://doi-org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1016/1048-9843(95)90032-2

Covid live updates: Latest on vaccine distribution and rising U.S. Covid cases. (2021, January 06). Retrieved January 06, 2021, from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/2020-01-06-covid-live-updates-vaccine-news-n1252954

Smith, T. (2021, January 06). 22 Publix stores to offer COVID-19 vaccinations. Retrieved January 06, 2021, from https://www.winknews.com/2021/01/05/22-publix-stores-to-offer-covid-19-vaccinations/