Leadership and support in health and social services: challenges and issues

Leadership and support in health and social services: challenges and issues

Question

Relationship between leader and followers

Leadership is considered one of the most important aspects of healthcare. A strong and appropriate leadership style helps communicate the goals of healthcare to constituents and helps recognize the potential of individual healthcare professionals who are responsible for delivering the quality care they provide to patients ( Alilyyani et al., 2018). Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between leaders and followers and highlight the difficulties faced by the former in health and social care. This paper also focuses on issues related to gaining and retaining followers in the healthcare field.

Relationship between leader and followers

Followership is viewed as a concept that demonstrates the ability of a group of individuals to carry out the instructions of a leader. They are the people who drive programs and strive to achieve organizational goals and objectives (Busari et al., 2019). Followers are highly influenced and inspired by their leaders and tend to act on their leaders’ guidance and advice. Therefore, both leadership and followership are equally important as leaders help followers develop while followers help contribute to the leader’s success in achieving both organizational goals and objectives. caution should be taken (Busari et al., 2019). For example, leaders tend to have a strong influence on their followers, with the latter also influencing the former, which can be negative or positive (Chatwani, 2018). Tasks and goals can be better managed, monitored, and evaluated through the joint cooperation and participation of leaders and followers.

Therefore, it can be said that effective leadership cannot be achieved without followers, as leaders always need people who can follow their advice to achieve organizational goals. It must be noted that both leaders and followers have rights (Chatwani, 2018). For example, it is a manager’s right to expect that work will be completed on time, that integrity will be demonstrated, and that decisions will be supported and respected. Conversely, followers also have the right to be respected and valued by their leaders if they expect equal opportunities and equal delegation of work (Salas et al., 2020).

Therefore, it can be said that leader-follower relationships are characterized by trust, respect, and transparency and help foster effective collaboration, which leads to the achievement of the organization’s mission, thereby increasing the organization’s profitability and reputation. Masu.

Challenges faced by health and social care leaders

Health and social care leaders are facing significant challenges due to the changing external and internal healthcare scenario. Transactional leadership and transformational leadership are her two styles most suited to health and social care (Richards, 2020). When a transactional leadership style is adopted in the health and social care sector, leaders use rewards and punishments to try to achieve compliance from followers, promoting improved productivity and performance of health and social care staff ( Richards, 2020).

However, today’s leaders face a shortage of qualified personnel in the medical field, which prevents them from practicing the types of leadership described above that help ensure timely and quality health and social care. (Nyström et al., 2018). Apart from this, another challenge health and social care leaders face is the changing needs and demands of their staff. In other words, staff working in these areas come from different backgrounds and have different psychological expectations, making it very difficult for managers to understand what kind of motivation clinical staff need. (Nyström et al., 2018). For this reason, transactional leadership does not effectively address the reward and punishment aspects. Transformational leadership has also proven highly relevant to health and social care. Because transformational leaders in these areas initiate relevant changes within their organizations that contribute to patient satisfaction and quality care (Jambawo, 2018).

Leadership style also helps leaders adapt their leadership style to changing environments and situations, and helps leaders create a balance between job resources and job demands, resulting in an effective patient culture. (Jambawo, 2018). However, some of the difficulties leaders face in effectively applying this leadership style is the need for transparency to inform employees about required or related changes that lead to quality that needs to be kept up to date. There is a lack of technical resources that can help establish high levels of communication. patients (Oleribe et al., 2019). Budget constraints are also a challenge for health and social care leaders, which prevents them from providing efficient staff training that directly impacts the achievement of organizational goals (Oleribe et al., 2019). Similarly, lack of budget prevents administrators from providing relevant resources that lead to further development of staff and effective patient care.

Apart from this, leaders also face the difficulty of offering different job roles and a variety of health and social care staff which makes their work quite monotonous and has a direct impact on their work quality has led to the issue of staff shortage in these sectors. Similarly, health and social care sectors do not have effective and updated recruitment systems which do not allow them to attract talented and skilled followers (Karam et al., 2018).

Thus, it should be noted that since there are fewer training programs within health and social care this leads to stagnancy in the growth and development of staff which makes it quite difficult for leaders to retain followers (Karam et al., 2018). Apart from this, the lack of updated technology in both recruitment and job process does not help in attracting followers and neither retaining them as they are unable to offer quality care to patients (Bridgeman et al., 2018). Additionally, due to lack of job variety, growth of job skills and inefficiency of healthcare leaders to understand and meet the psychological expectations of health and social care staff is another issue associated with attracting and keeping followers (Bridgeman et al., 2018).

References

As reported by Alilyyani et al. (2018), Antecedents, mediators, and outcomes of authentic leadership in healthcare: A systematic review. International jouranl of nursing studies volume 83, pages 34-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2018.04.001

A 2018 study by Bridgeman, P. J., M. B. Bridgeman, and Barone, J. Burnout syndrome among healthcare professionals. From issue 3 of the Bulletin of the American Society of Hospital Pharmacists, pages 147-152. https://doi.org/10.2146/ajhp170460

In 2019, Busari et al. wrote. Interconnected are leadership style, followers, and employees’ responses to company change. Journal of Asia Business Studies. https://doi.org/10.1108/JABS-03-2018-0083

Chatwani, N. (2018). Balancing leadership and followership is key to distributed leadership principles. Palgrave Macmillan.

Jambawo, S. (2018). Transformational leadership and ethical leadership: In the mental healthcare system, significant are mental healthcare providers. (British Journal of Nursing) Volume 27, Issue 17, pp. 998-1001. https://doi.org/10.12968/bjon.2018.27.17.998

Karam, M., Brault, I., Van Durme, T., and Macq, J., (2018). Comparing interprofessional and interorganizational collaboration in healthcare: Through a systematic review, we analyze qualitative research in depth. Journal of nursing studies, international, volume 79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2017.11.002

Nyström et al. (2018) Collaborative and partnership research for improvement of health and social services: researcher’s experiences from 20 projects. In the pages of this publication, research on policy and health systems, issues 16(1), 1-17. https://doi.org//10.1186/s12961-018-0322

According to Oleribe et al. (2019) … Key challenges faced by African healthcare systems and possible solutions. In the journal of general medicine, international, volume 12, article 395. https://doi.org//10.2147/IJGM.S223882

Richards, A. (2020). In healthcare, the benefits and limitations of transactional leadership. Nursing Standard, 35(12), 46-50. https://doi.org/10.7748/ns.2020.e11593