MHA 601 Principles in Healthcare Administration / Week 6 Discussions

Week 6 Guidance

This week, Discussion 1: asks students to propose strategies for developing management

staff, medical staff, and governing body/board in a learning organization. There are slightly different strategies for developing management staff, medical staff, and governing

body/board written under 10.2 Organizational Development.

Change is occurring rapidly. Organizations continue encountering even greater rates of change through their dynamic environments. Managing the resources for sustained

performance has become increasingly difficult. Organization’s success and effectiveness highly depend on leaders’ possessing an appropriate balance of skills, competencies, and

capabilities (Breton, Lamothe, & Jean-Louis, 2014; Schermerhorn, Osborn, Uhl-Bien, & Hunt, 2012). In this regard, leadership development has become the hottest topic in

organizations around the world. To navigate the world’s rapidly changing economic, social,

technological, and political dynamics, leaders must become better educated to take on

challenges effectively and ethically. Nevertheless, most organizations do not have

leadership talent required to establish a competitive advantage.

Organizations can acquire needed leadership by either recruiting leaders from outside or

building leadership talent (Frates, 2014; Schermerhor n et al., 2012). Recruiting leaders

from outside seems to save huge cost in human resources development. In fact, organizations can benefit more in the long run if they build a pipeline of leaders.

Organizations can nurture their next generation leaders in line with their own culture, requisite skills, and strategic agenda (Swearingen, 2009). As such, in response to today’s

complex environment, organizations should not only proactively build future leaders, but also accelerate the development of current lea ders.

Leadership development programs are educational interventions designed to address and

improve the leadership capabilities of individuals. Organizations ought to make use of

leadership development as a platform for driving change by strengthening th e ability of

both present and future leaders to increase long -term organizational performance through

more effective leadership (McAlearney & Bulter, 2008; Schermerhorn et al., 2012; Swearingen, 2009). Research study conducted by McAlearney and Bulter (200 8) revealed

that effective leadership development can improve healthcare quality and efficiency as a consequence of reduced turnover and related expenses and increased caliber of the

workforce. In Wong and Cummings’s (as cited in Swearingen, 2009) study, t he results

confirmed that lower quality of nursing leadership leads to higher nursing turnover and lower healthcare quality, which, ultimately, results in more adverse patient events.

Leadership development has become an important way to implement change in the

organizations, and, increasingly, in-house programs are more likely to dominate the

corporate development agenda (Grandy & Holton, 2013; Swearingen, 2009; Schermerhorn

et al., 2012). However, it is important to ask whether organizations can develop accurate

contingency models of leadership to reflect today’s complex world. Another question is that

whether leaders can reap the benefits of training and develop sufficient versatility in their

skills and behavioral repertories in order to lead the change and cope with the changing circumstances.

Discussion 2: covers changes in health care. Organizational change is stimulated by both external and internal factors. External factors include regulatory, social, technological,

economic, and competitive factors. As we have seen in the past few years, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 has transformed the healthcare industry. What

are three important factors that contribute to changes in the healthcare industry? Could you propose three strategies that health care leaders can employ to lead their learning

organizations in today’s turbulent environment?