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The critical role of leadership in the health and social care sector is to improve the quality of caregiving services. The leaders of this sector aim to spread this quality improvement approach throughout all levels of the organization associated with health and social care services. This present report is made for the stakeholders related to this sector. Different leadership and motivational theories and their impacts on this sector are also elaborately analyzed in this report. Performance management, the importance of an effective healthcare team, different team leadership and management models, and many other aspects related to this sector are discussed in this report.
Trait theory, Behavioral theory, Process theory, and Situational theory of leadership are the most relevant in the context of healthcare and social services.
Trait Theory
Trait theory suggests that there are several inherent characteristics of traits of individuals that make them effective leaders. These characteristics include personality, intelligence, physical, and emotional factors. Effective communication skill is an important trait that must be possessed by the leaders associated with the healthcare sector.
Behavioral Theory
The behavioral theory of leadership suggests the success of a team is dependable on the b behaviors that drive it toward success. This theory designed two styles of leaders; task-oriented leaders will be more concerned with the caregiving service of the organization and the success of the sector (Peters, 2018). People-oriented leaders will promote collaboration, rewards against success, and mentorship among caregivers.
Process Theory
According to Goleman leadership is a process that is mostly dependent on the interaction between the leaders and their subordinates. This theory makes leadership accessible to all the members of the organization rather than only the people with some specific skills. This theory emphasizes both the situational aspect and the behavioral aspect. It proposed that if the individual from the healthcare sector meet the situational demand and can efficiently exchange relationship with the followers can be an effective leader.
The challenges that are associated with the leaders of the health and social care sector are stated below;
Cyber-security
The incorporation of digitalization in the health sector definitely improved communication among the different sectors of healthcare and made several administrative works easier. Here cybersecurity is an emerging issue in this field (Brockie et al. 2021). The digital records of patients and several studies, and case histories can be the target of cybercriminals.
Big data
Medical issues are increasing day by day which is why big data is possessed by this industry. The leaders need to offer relevant insight and formulate new care management processes. It burdens the responsibility of the leaders that are improving working efficiency, reducing administrative burdens, and many other things.
Dealing with worker stress
All the healthcare providers work for long hours and their work is engaged with a regular experience of the life and death of the patients. It produces a lot of stress for the caregivers. As it is a 24 hours emergency service and there are several shifting of works. It makes the work process of healthcare hectic for the executives who are associated with staff management (Maphumulo and Bhengu, 2019). The leaders have to efficiently deal with this stress and maintain the productivity of the sector.
Strict regulatory environment
Healthcare organizations pay a handsome amount of time and money on the ethical grounds of the healthcare industry. For example, a hospital has to go through multiple regulatory processes from auditing to licensing.
Major leadership styles such as transformational, transactional, charismatic, and situational leadership, are relevant in the context of health and social care services.
Transformational leadership
The fundamental content of the transformational theory of leadership is to empower the staff regardless of their positions and job descriptions. Transformational leaders usually motivate, and regulate energies among the caregivers and direct them to achieve the goals of the healthcare organizations (Asbari et al. 2021). They promote and encourage creativity in the healthcare sector. They also encouraged those members of the group who are supportive in nature, provide unique ideas, and have great communication skills. The Embracement of this style of leadership is beneficial for managing turbulent changes.
Transactional leadership
Transactional leadership styles mostly focused on supervision and effective group performance. The key feature of this style is that it perceived the relationship between healthcare executives and healthcare staff as transactional. This style of leadership used several motivating tools such as reward, and punishment (Purwanto et al. 2021). Transactional leaders put more emphasis on standards, procedures, respect toward rules, clarity of the job roles, regular supervision, and many either thing.
Charismatic Leadership
Charismatic leaders are possessed several characteristics such as emotional expressiveness, control, sensitivity, and social expressiveness and control. These traits can bring a large number of people to a common goal. It can emotionally tie up the crews of the healthcare services on the ground of social responsibilities.
Situational Leadership
Healthcare leaders who use the situational approach, give priority to the diversity of the situation and act according to the different situations (Thompson and Glasø, 2018). Situational leaders usually encourage the participation of every individual in the process of achieving goals.
“Maslow’s hierarchy of motivational needs” generally helps in the improvement of performance in the health and social care sector. Heath care sector consists of different individuals who belong to other departments respectively (?tefan et al. 2020). The performance of the healthcare sector can only improve if there is coordination and all the individual departments work together as a single unit.
Maslow’s Motivational theory is the understanding of what encourages an individual to work toward a particular goal. This help the healthcare sector to motivate and encourage its caretakers in order to get the best performance out of them. The hierarchy can be represented in five steps which are as follows:
Therefore using Maslow’s motivation theory there can be seen certain improvements in the performance of the healthcare sectors.
Caretakers in the healthcare sector are affected by various factors that have an effect on their motivation and their performance. The motivational theory has different aspects that can help the sectors to motivate their caregivers to improve their performance further (Abbas, 2020).
The major factors that usually affect staff engagement and motivation levels at their workplace are discussed below.
Reward
The “employee rewards scheme” will help in enhancing caregivers' productivity. Performance by motivating and supporting their work (Leonard et al. 2019). The factor of providing rewards to caregivers in order to encourage them to perform better can have an impact on the performance of the healthcare sector.
Trust
Higher authorities need to build trust in their caregivers by trusting them to provide high-quality service to their clients which will build a great culture within the organization.
Recognition
Recognizing individual caregivers’ hard work and effort can have a massive impact on the performance of the healthcare sector as recognition will give them fame which will motivate them further to perform better in the future
Good working culture
A good and positive organizational workplace culture is also necessary in order to motivate caregivers to perform better. It becomes necessary to motivate caregivers on their bad days so that they feel secure while working. This will have a direct impact on the performance of the organization.
Feedback
The caregivers also need to be appreciated for their good work which will increase their self-confidence and will also motivate perform better. On the contrary, if a caretaker is not performing up to the required expectation then regular feedback can help them understand their mistakes and rectify them to perform better in the future.
Healthcare and social care sectors benefit a lot from analyzing their performance management. It helps them to meet their goals consistently and in an efficient manner. It helps them to achieve goals in the areas related to patient care, accountability, maintaining good quality standards, managing the cost, and managing the data (Chakraborty et al. 2019). Performance management helps healthcare sectors to differentiate between what is happening in the organization to what seems to be happening. This again helps them to get a general idea of the mistakes that are being committed at present and what needs to be rectified in order to get back to normal terms. This will have a positive impact on the growth of the healthcare sector (Suleiman et al. 2020). Performance management helps to take correct decisions the management as most of these decisions are taken based on solid evidence got from the Performance data. Correct decisions mean that the sector is heading in the right direction of change that will be beneficial to them in the near future. It also helps to recognize improvement in performance for different caretakers working in the healthcare sector.
Work culture is associated with the beliefs, philosophies, attitudes, and perceptions of the workers of the organization. Work culture in the healthcare setting suggested the way caregivers, medical, nursing staff, and executives work toward the target of achieving the organizational goal in different entities like hospitals, clinics, and other health institutions.
Patient satisfaction is the key driver of a positive culture in the healthcare sector. The equity and diversity of the services determine the positive work culture (Gomez and Bernet, 2019). The caregiving service from the organization must treat every patient equally regardless of their ethnic group or economic class. The leaders of the healthcare sector must understand deeply their responsibilities. Negative influences like bullying, discrimination, harassment, and many others must be restricted with tight supervision. There must be zero tolerance for such activities that put down the morale of the team. Team members are empowered to demolish the negative behaviors and influences to manifest positive culture in the healthcare organization (Kleinman, 2020). When there is unhappiness and disconnectedness among the caregivers it is impossible to formulate patient satisfaction. Good communication among the caregivers and building trust toward the other members can be productive to create a positive culture in the healthcare sector.
The key features of an effective healthcare team include clarity of expectation, diversity in opinion and one goal, open communication, selflessness in teamwork, constructive dialects, drive for innovation, flexibility, and many other aspects.
Clarity of expectation: The leader of the healthcare team has to clearly define what exactly he or she is expecting from the subordinates. Besides that, according to these expectations, the leader needs to guide their followers to meet the organizational goals.
Diversity in opinion: An effective team always possessed empowered members. The leader needs to create opportunities where the members can put their opinions to chase the one common goal.
Open Communication: Communication among the caregiver, communication with the patients, and communication between the executives and the medical staff are required to form an effective healthcare team.
Selflessness in teamwork: The members of the healthcare organization need to understand that they are in a novel profession that demands a characteristic of selflessness (Wilson, 2021). The caregivers usually do not prioritize their “self” first in an effective healthcare team.
Constructive Dialects: While there is a chance of keeping their opinion on several issues, there is a high possibility of a clash between opinions (Wade, 2020). A leader of an effective healthcare team nicely handles such conflicts and directs these conflicts toward new innovations in the healthcare sector.
Drive for innovation: The members of an effective healthcare team try to provide unique ideas, and concepts to intensify the caregiving services.
The Katzenbach and Smith model originated in the year 1993, on the basis of information regarding workplace challenges. This model suggested there are five levels of teamwork; a working group, a pseudo group, a potential team, a real team, and a high-performing team. A high-performing team or healthcare team is full of team members who emphasized some aspects beyond just working together (Abyad, 2018). Three main outputs from a high-performing team are collective work products, performance results, and personal growth.
A high-performing healthcare team needs to work on these three outcomes and needs to emphasize three effectiveness factors: skills,m accountability, and commitment.
Figure: Triangular model of Katzenbach and Smith
One of the effective factor skills involves the skill of problem-solving, technical and functional skills, and interpersonal skills. Highly-productive healthcare team needs competent members possessing these skills. There is a requirement for accountability among effective healthcare team members (DEM?RC?, 2018). Mutual respect and understanding must be there between the team members. A b commitment of the individual is needed for an effective healthcare team. The team members need to be well aware of their specific goals, and their purposes in the healthcare organization.
Katzenbach and Smith's model can be applied to various sectors of healthcare services. Katzenbach and Smith’s model requires individuals to possess problem-solving skills which can help healthcare caretaker leaders to take important decisions in critical situations. Leaders need to provide solutions to their caretakers in order to handle critical situations (Mathur et al. 2018). Leaders also need to possess interpersonal communication skills as communication with different patients who may belong to diverse cultures is key in order to successfully treat them for their diseases. This model can also be applied to a team of caretakers who are facing a lot of problems to adopt a team culture within the sectors. It helps a team to be engaged with each other thereby increasing their overall performance. This model requires individuals to be accountable for themselves, if individuals are accountable then caretakers of all kinds will take up individual responsibility to make sure that the job is done efficiently (Gali et al. 2022). Mutual accountability is also required which will help a team take up the responsibility to complete the assigned task efficiently. The commitment mentioned in this theory is also applicable to different leaders and caretakers in the healthcare sector. If leaders and caretakers are committed to a specific goal then they will be able to achieve that goal very easily (Kolodziej-Smith, 2018). This will have a direct impact on the performance of the individual thereby affecting the performance of various healthcare sectors in a positive way.
Strategies to overcome challenges of healthcare team performance
Team performance brings in a lot of benefits if used in an efficient way, but there are a lot of challenges associated with it. To get the benefits of team performance it becomes vital to overcoming those challenges (Gulzar and ZIA-UR-REHMAN, 2021). There are many strategies but here it is important to discuss the two most important strategies that can help to overcome challenges related to healthcare team performance.
Effectiveness of team: If a team is not clearly analyzed or if it is not used properly then the team is bound to be always on the move and not well defined. This will not produce a good performance as a team. Therefore the team will not be able to perform to its expectations. Therefore a team needs to be effective in order to produce the desired results.
Team functioning: Good performance comes from teams that are directed and function effectively. Teamwork and Taskwork are very important when comes to team functioning. Teamwork emphasizes interrelated attitudes between each other, and behaviors. Taskwork focuses on actions that are required to be taken in order to successfully complete the task.
Different management styles affect the performance of the healthcare team in different ways. If the sector manager follows the Authoritarian management style the team cannot afford to make mistakes as it demands things to be done precisely. Healthcare sector managers following this type of management style are seen to be found that there is negative behavior from the caretakers that involves robbery, spending time surfing the internet during work, and also is seen to misuse over time (Pfutzenreuter et al. 2020). This creates negative caretaker engagement and therefore affects their performance. Sectors managers that follow the Laissez-Faire management style are seen to be exactly opposite to that of the Authoritarian Management Style. This management style provides freedom for their caretakers to express themselves freely it is also built on trust in the caretaker's knowledge, skills, and judgment (Bansal et al. 2019). This management style erases a lot of negative behavior and brings in a lot of positivity as they feel free to express themselves. The Coaching management style may also be followed by different healthcare sectors that help higher authorities to train their caretakers working in the sector (Schmutz et al. 2019). Here leaders’ roles are very important as they take the responsibility to train their caretakers. This again can have a positive impact on a team’s performance as caretakers will be able to carry out their tasks efficiently.
Conclusion
Different leadership styles and theories related to improving the working of the team performance in healthcare sectors are very important. Different leadership styles can be applied to different healthcare sectors based on its requirement. Analysis of different leadership models also helps to understand different aspects of leadership to improve team performance in the healthcare sector. Factors related to motivational theory also help to understand different aspects of team performance. Various strategies are also mentioned to overcome challenges due to effective team performance. Overall to conclude this study adapting to different leadership styles and focusing on team performance will help improve healthcare sectors.
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