MHA 601 Principles in Healthcare Administration / Leadership & Debate

This week, Discussion 1:

asks students to conduct a search to find a healthcare leader. Based upon the reading from

Chapter 5, students identify a leadership theory that best describes this individual’s leadership

style.

The evolution of leadership theory has an over 100-year history. In the early days, there was the

“Great Man Theory” (Frates, 2014). In the twentieth century, a wide variety of theories have

been conjectured. Early study focused on the traits, or personal characteristics of leaders.

Researchers on trait leadership concluded that there are some underlying set of commonalities

among great leaders. Later research shifted to explore actual leader behaviors in which

researchers attempted to identify behaviors that differentiated effective leaders from non-

effective leaders. The Michigan Leadership Studies, the Ohio State Leadership Studies, and the

Managerial Grid are examples of behavioral approaches to leadership (Frates, 2014; Johnson,

2009; Robbins & Judge, 2015). Fiedler’s Contingency Model, House’s Path Goal Model,

Vroom-Jago Leadership Model, Hersey-Blanchard’s Situational Leadership, and Burns’s

Transactional/ Transformational Leadership have contributed to the construct of leadership in a

substantive way. Built upon Burns’s work, Bass (as cited in Robbin & Judge, 2015) devised a

theoretical framework to studying two aspects of leadership – transformational leadership and

transactional leadership – and further differentiated between these two types of leadership.

Although there is great controversy regarding the definition of leadership and approaches to

studying the concept and theories of various leadership models, it is apparent that none of these

theories has yet provided a completely satisfactory explanation. While not a single leadership

paradigm has comprehensively treated the entire domain of leadership phenomenon, each has

made unique contributions to the understanding of this complex construct of leadership. All

theories combined provide a great deal of insights and principals from a wide spectrum of

perspectives. The knowledge of leadership gained from these theories described in the required

textbook by Frates (2014) is overly pragmatic, which can be applied to the real world situations

for improving productivity, employee morale, employee retention, and profits. A leader is the

one who has the capability of creating positive change for the betterment of others, the

community, and society. Transforming an organization is a challenging and time-consuming task

that requires collective resources, and yet leadership plays a major role in the success of

organizational transformation. Opportunity creates leadership. Leadership creates opportunity. A

successful transformation will highly depend on how the leaders apply learned knowledge and

skills to mobilize human resources to embrace and make changes.

Discussion 2:

Covers Debates on Organizational Power and Politics. Students are divided into two groups:

Positive and Negative. Students create a YouTube video addressing the discussion questions

associated with the group they were assigned. Students may create a multimedia to complete the

task for this debate; however, please reach out to your instructor if you experience the technical

issue. This Discussion asks: What are positive/negative impacts on an organization when its

members exercise power and play political games within Mintzberg’s Political Game Playing

framework? Give examples and/or your personal experiences regarding positive/negative

impacts. In Table 6.1 Mintzberg’s Power Game of the required textbook by Frates (2014),

Mintzberg described 13 power games: Insurgency, Counter-insurgency, Sponsorship, Alliance-

building, Empire-building, Budgeting, Expertise, Lording, Line vs. Staff, Rival Camps, Strategic

candidates, Whistle-blowing, and Young Turks. Students may select at least one of the 13 power

games to elaborate for this Discussion.

Additional resources

Get comfortable with teamwork conflict. Retrieved from

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV15JvPwOOE

Mark de Rond, professor at Cambridge's Judge Business School, explains how conflict can drive

team performance.

Conflict styles. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv9FEuk4Mhk

This video presents five different conflict styles and relates them to animals.

References:

Frates, J. (2014). Health care management: Theory in action. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint

Education, Inc.

Johnson, J. A. (2009). Health organizations: Theory, behavior, and development. Sudbury, MA:

Jones and Bartlett Publishers.

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2015). Organizational behavior (16th ed.). Upper Saddle River,

NJ: Prentice Hall.