Health Care Organizational Structure, Culture and Leadership Analysis

 Health Care Organizational Structure, Culture and Leadership Analysis

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Health Care Organizational Structure, Culture and Leadership Analysis

Organizational Theory Section
            Organization theory is the process of creating knowledge base with the aim of understanding the organizational structure in order to predict and control effectiveness or productivity by shaping organizations. Over the last few decades, healthcare organizations have undergone extreme transformations. External and internal factors have facilitated changes in these institutions’ structure, operation, and organization. In terms of organizational management, healthcare centers are no different from other establishments: the managers are required to lead, supervise, and coordinate activities seamlessly. However, issues such as medical errors, service failures, shortage of staff, and harmful treatment delays require proper analysis and timely solutions thus making management of healthcare institutions a challenging task.

            There are four major groups of theories that have been advanced to help understand how organizations function and how they are structured. In particular, these groups are the classical theories, human relations theories, contingency or decision theories, and modern systems theories. Classical theories are the traditional ones that include administrative, bureaucratic, and scientific management approach (Khorasani & Almasifard, 2017). Evolution theorists like Henri Fayol, Fredric Taylor, Max Weber, and Luther Gulick are popular for their contributions to classical theories.

My clinical setting’s management approach can best be described by Henri Fayol’s administrative theory. Fayol identified the roles of management to be: planning, coordinating, controlling, commanding, and organizing. These functions were later expounded by Luther Gullick to include Planning, Organizing, Directing, Staffing, Coordinating, Reporting, and Budgeting (PODSCORB). In my clinical setting, there are top, middle, and lower levels of management. Essentially, each member of the various levels is assigned a specific duty in line with their expertise. In his theory, Henri Fayol describes this scenario as a division of labor and specialization.

The unity of command at the facility promotes discipline, stability, and orderly existence. The chief executive officer has the responsibility of managing other departments in the hospital, and the middle-level managers report to her. Generally, the orderliness at the Cornwall Community Hospital can be attributed to the unity of command. Ideally, every member receives orders and reports to one person who is the hospital’s chief executive officer. The existence of cordial relations between the hospital managers and the subordinates reflect that the employees are valued regardless of race, sex, caste, or religion. I believe that Fayol’s administrative theory is the ideal approach for my organization since its universal applicability best serves to the interdisciplinary cooperation at the hospital and its effective management.

Organizational Culture
            Organizational culture encompasses expectations, values, philosophy, and behaviors that create a unique social and psychological ambiance (Glisson, 2015). Shared attitudes, rules, and customs are the basic components that make up culture. Therefore, this means that certain habits, beliefs, mission, norms, and values of an organization are the determinants of its culture. In 1980, in the quest to explain why the behavior of people differs from one organization to another, Edgar Schein developed a theory to help understand the importance of culture in organizations. Schein observed that culture is constantly being formed and that change is inevitable in every area of human life (Schein, 2010a). According to Schein (2010a), the culture within an organization is formed over time as employees go through change, adapt to the external surroundings, and handle problems. Essentially, employees learn from their past mistakes and practice new habits, which finally become the organization’s culture. Schein (2010a) argues that organizations comprise of direct and indirect mechanisms. The direct mechanisms like opinions and behavior openly impact an organization’s culture. On the other hand, indirect mechanisms, for example, the vision and mission of a company, corporate identity, and design do not determine an organization’s culture, but are instead the causal factors.

            Schein (2010b) suggests that there are three levels of organizational culture: behavior and artifacts, espoused values, and basic assumptions. Artifacts are marked by the visible aspects of an organization’s culture encompassing the physical and social environment. The things that can be viewed touched, heard, and felt by people, for example, corporate dress code, furniture, technology in use, decorations, architec