No matter how unique an organisation might be and how unprecedentedly its goals and strategies could be shaped, it needs to be based on a set of standards and notions that are deemed as generally required for any company. Particularly, it is crucial to establish a set of values based on which the decision-making process will occur in the identified setting, and the manner of leading the team and managing the essential tasks performed in the environment of a firm. Therefore, to make sure that all elements of an organisational design are managed successfully and all corporate processes run smoothly, one must make sure that the notions in question are identified and incorporated into the very nature of a firm. Among the key concepts that need to be identified and shaped before creating an organisation, leadership and management, as well as conflict and negotiation, must be named.
Leadership and Management
Although the concepts of leadership and management are often conflated, they, in fact, represent quite different ideas. While management is typically viewed as a process-oriented notion, i.e., the set of theories that allow enhancing and improving the process of achieving particular goals, leadership is usually interpreted as a people-oriented concept, i.e., the ability to inspire people to develop necessary qualities (Porter-O’Grady & Malloch 2015, p. 21). It should be noted that there is a propensity nowadays to consider the specified way of interpreting the phenomenon of management as quite outdated. To be more accurate, the contemporary interpretation of management also involves a close focus on the vision and goals of a particular organisation or its project, as well as communication as one of the essential components of success (Sare & Ogilvie 2016, p. 15).
Bureaucratic and Human-Related Management Theories embrace the possible scopes of managerial processes, suggesting that a manager chooses between establishing rigid control for providing participants with a significant amount of flexibility in their decision-making. It should be noted, though, that neither of the extremes should be viewed as the ultimate solution to management-related issues. While the use of a flexibility-oriented approach is preferable, a manager must be able to balance between the two strategies.
Furthermore, management can be explored from the standpoint of the Contingency Theory and the Systems Theory. The latter allows viewing the process of managing a particular project or organisation as a combination of elements that are interrelated and interdependent. In other words, an organisation is viewed as a complex mechanism, in which every cog plays a specific function, and where introducing even the smallest change to any item will immediately result in alterations across the entire system (Reilly et al. 2014, p. 787). The Contingency Theory, in turn, shifts the perspective from the evaluation of internal factors and elements to the analysis of external ones. As a result, an in-depth assessment of key performance factors becomes a possibility (Otley 2016, p. 46).
Leadership, in turn, implies that participants receive a powerful impetus for excelling in their performance and focusing on the consistent improvement and learning. Put differently, leadership suggests providing the target population with a role model that will guide them toward the further positive change. The active promotion of corporate values and the rise in motivation levels among team members become possible once an appropriate leadership style is selected. Unlike management, which is typically viewed as goal-setting, leadership has many definitions, most of which emphasise the importance of exerting a positive influence and compelling participants to change.
Conflict and Negotiation
Misunderstandings and the following confrontations are part and parcel of the workplace environment. Therefore, it is essential to identify the strategies that will allow managing emerging conflicts and help participants reconcile, at the same time working toward a compromise and building the setting in which team members can learn from different conflict situations and the choices that they made, including their mistakes. As a result, similar issues can be avoided in the future.
Herein lies the importance of negotiations. By definition, the phenomenon of a negotiation implies that a conflict between two or more people is handled by compelling the parties to work on a settlement since they disagree about the ways of resolving a certain issue (Lochner 2017, p. 3). As a rule, five stages of negotiation are identified. These include Pre-Negotiation, Opening, Exploring, Bargaining, and Settlement. To start the negotiation process, one must define the Best Alternative to the Negotiation Agreement (BATNA), which serves as the point at which the sides of the negotiation start developing suggestions that satisfy their needs better than the constructed BATNA idea (Brett 2017, p. 2). The resistance point and target point, in turn, allow the participants of the negotiation process to keep an eye on their goals and make sure that their needs are met accordingly. Distributive bargaining, which is a negotiation strategy focused on winning the process, is typically opposed to the integrative negotiation approach, which suggests that the needs of all stakeholders are met (Zant & Kray 2015, p. 829).
Impact on a Healthcare Organisation
Creating the environment in which a healthcare organisation can function properly is a crucial step toward delivering necessary services to the target population and contributing to a significant improvement in the number of positive patient outcomes. Therefore, appropriate leadership strategies and negotiation techniques are the factors on which the efficacy of a healthcare facility hinges. Consequently, it is imperative to introduce efficient leadership and management approaches, as well as the strategies that allow for fast conflict resolutions and constructive negotiation processes. The specified issue is especially significant for the organisation known as National Health Service (NHS). By exploring the opportunities for exerting positive leadership and enhancing the negotiation process in the identified healthcare organisation, one will be able to introduce the staff members to the principles of the Social Corporate Responsibility, thus, leading to a significant improvement in the organizational behaviour of the staff. With the use of the Transformational Leadership (TL) framework, one will be able to change the attitudes among staff members at NHS toward more positive ones, thus, improving its culture. Thus, the culture of the organization will become patient-oriented and based on a rigid set of ethical standards.
When applying the concept of leadership to the realm of NHS, one must admit that a change in leadership and management is bound to have a massive impact on the environment of an organisation, as well as the ways in which its members interact, the ways in which decisions are made, etc. For instance, the introduction of the leadership framework based on transforming the vision of its participants and introducing them to the principles of multicultural communication is bound to lead to a significant change in the quality of care, as well as the efficacy of addressing the needs of social, ethnic, and cultural minorities living in the specified community. Particularly, the change in the leadership approach and the reconsideration of the management techniques will create premises for a significant shift in the organisational culture toward a closer focus on the unique needs of the target population (Coleman et al. 2016, p. 34). The values associated with patient-centred care will be promoted more effectively to the target population, and nurses will accept a new vision and mission faster, thus, leading to a significant organizational change.
At this point, though, one might argue that a massive change in the organisational culture may lead to shaking the participants’ sense of belonging and, therefore, affecting their security levels. The specified issue is likely to occur unless a profound system of values and healthcare philosophies is incorporated into the newly introduced approach toward managing the needs of the target population and creating the programs that allow for a more efficient communication with the community members. Therefore, one must promote the active use of the transformational leadership approach as the tool for keeping the motivation levels high among the participants, reducing their resistance toward change, and ensuring that their security levels remain high. Among the artefacts that will contribute to maintaining the specified corporate philosophy afloat, one must mention IT tools that contribute to an extensive enhancement of the communication process. For instance, the introduction of Telehealth tools is bound to reinvent the process of managing the needs of the target population. The adoption of Telehealth devices is bound to lead to a massive improvement in the management of the relevant information (Al-Fadhli et al. 2015, p. 104). Telehealth-based IT devices will lead to a much more cohesive process of information transfer between the members of the healthcare facility under analysis, as well as between NHS and the population whose needs it strives to meet. Therefore, Telehealth must be deemed as one of the primary artefacts of change in the organisational culture. Similarly, the values and assumptions on which the leadership framework is based must be altered significantly. While the focus on the needs of the multicultural population, as well as the differences between urban and rural residents, must be retained so that efficient strategies for meeting the needs of the identified demographics could be designed, it is also imperative to introduce the approaches that will lead to a significant enhancement of the multicultural communication as an important part of the organizational culture. For this purpose, the idea of lifelong learning as the basis for the consistent increase in the competency levels of the organisation’s participants must be included in the system of organisational values. Thus, the concept of an employee that follows the principles of the lifelong learning approach and engages in the active acquisition of knowledge linked to healthcare and the specifics of a multicultural community must be viewed as the key assumption in accordance with Schein’s model (Kelley & Huckaby 2015, pp. 2-3). The concept of diversity and multiculturalism as the basis for developing the strategies for addressing healthcare concerns in the realm of NYC communities, in turn, must be deemed as a crucial value that must underlie the choices made by NHS’s members. As a result, a crucial change will be made to the organizational culture of NHS since it will embrace the needs of a vaster range of stakeholders and contribute to a rise in the quality of cross-cultural communication between its members and the target population.
The identified change is bound to align with the current organic structure of the company. A closer look at the way in which NHS is structured will reveal that it has a rather flexible hierarchy, which opens a plethora of possibilities for an uninhibited flow of the information. At this point, though, one must address the obvious problem of data safety, which appears in the setting that does not imply rigid control over the crucial organisational processes. Because of the absence of tight control over the communication process, the chances for securing the available information are reduced to a considerable extent, hence the need to introduce more efficient tools for information safety. Particularly, placing sensitive information in the repositories that cannot be accessed by anyone else except the members of NHS must be considered a necessity (Holden et al. 2015, p. 2).
The issue of conflict management will also have to be addressed as one of the areas that will require significant improvements (Polat et al. 2017, p. 109). While the strategy of conflict avoidance, on which the members of the organisation currently focus, can be used as a temporary solution to the emerging confrontations, it will need to be replaced with the framework that is much more suitable in the context of the global healthcare realm. Particularly, the need to promote the active acquisition of the skills required to analyse conflicts and use them as the starting points of learning new and important information about cross-cultural communication strategies must be regarded as a necessity. The specified approach toward handling issues in the context of NHS organisation will lead to the enhancement of collaboration and information sharing, which, in turn, will provide extensive opportunities for a rapid improvement in the quality of care.
Furthermore, the introduction of the transformational leadership tools mentioned above is bound to affect the process of learning and development in NHS environment positively. For instance, the opportunities for encouraging the members of the organisation to focus on the exploration of their abilities and the further development of their talents will become an option. The identified step is crucial to the overall improvement of the quality of healthcare services in the community. By fostering the principles of talent management in the realm of NHS, one will be able to build the system of values based on the idea of lifelong learning and unceasing acquisition of new knowledge and skills. The specified approach is especially important for managing the needs of patients from different social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds since it implies learning about the essential culture-related characteristics of the target demographics.
Furthermore, the use of training as the means of promoting the active acquisition of skills among nurses and healthcare practitioners must be deemed as a crucial step in improving the quality of care, as well as the number of positive patient outcomes. Therefore, the use of the leadership framework that will compel nurses and healthcare providers to engage in the active learning process will result in an immediate rise in the recovery rates among patients. Particularly, the issues of nosocomial infections and the nurses’ skills need to be addressed. As a study carried out by Varshney et al. (2014, p. 47) shows, the inability to comply with the suggested guidelines regarding the management of patients’ needs, in general, and the provision of patient safety, in particular, often contributes to the development of nosocomial infections. The specified phenomenon is especially common in the post-operational setting (Al-Kharkhi, Zeiny & Ali 2016, p. 51). The reconsideration of the approach based on which the staff members manage their tasks, including the provision of medications and the assistance during surgeries, and especially the significance of the precaution techniques used for preventing the situations in which patients’ health is jeopardised, is crucial (Singh et al. 2015, p. 16423).
Thus, it will be necessary to adopt the integrative approach that will contribute to the design of the nursing and healthcare programs leading to the faster acquisition of the necessary skills by nurses and healthcare providers. While the adoption of the transformational leadership strategy, which is primarily based on the trait approach, should be deemed as a necessity, the active use of the integrative approach will have to be considered as the primary goal. In other words, a combination of the transformational and situational leadership frameworks, as well as the ability to combine the two when approaching complex problems, will have to be incorporated into the program that NHS will design to enhance the quality of care in modern nursing facilities. The model will help introduce patient-centred philosophy and values, resulting in a rapid improvement in the organizational culture, particularly, the promotion of patient-oriented values and the focus on contributing to the organization.
Reference List
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