Management and behavioral leadership

Management and Behavioral Leadership

Name

Institution

Introduction

The most important aspect to the successful running of an organization is its management. Good management results into efficient running of an organization including improvement of the workability and work quality of the employees. Due to this, several theories have come up to enable organization leaders to function more efficiently and for profit maximization. This paper, thus, reviews a behavioral leadership theory and functions of management that best fits the manager’s role and responsibilities in a precepted clinical setting.

According to Egner (2009), every institutional leader has the responsibility to solve individual problems through a dynamic utilization of personnel. His duty is to develop and maintain a culture that encourages work. As a result, the leader has to utilize more than only the functions of management. He or she should show concern for production as well as people.

In a clinic, organization, planning, controlling, and directing are the main functions of the manager. Quality work is crucial for the patients’ well-being and the medical practitioners have to be experienced and well conversant in their job descriptions. Planning involves the selection of programs, projects, or objectives appropriate for the type of organization. Furthermore, it also involves the procedures and policies for accomplishing them. Lutz (2010), on the other hand, states that planning should always come before the action. This then has to be combined with employee motivation and training so that they realize the organization’s target goals, including the mission and vision. The manager also has to overcome resource and political barriers. This goes together with being keen on identifying any deviations from the plan and doing the necessary planning for correcting the problem. Consequently, it is important to note that these management functions are not only for the top manager, but also for all leaders in the clinic. The managing director should however act as the head of all subordinate leaders.

Organization of clinical personnel occurs chiefly to achieve maximum coordination. This ensures efficient synchronization of staff, equipment, materials, methods, and timing. The customers in a clinic are mainly patients who have to be directed from one room to another and efficient coordination will always result to customer satisfaction and minimum chaos. Furthermore, Lutz (2010) states that well defined and logical organizations encourage savings in efforts and energy and minimize frustration. As a management function, organization entails the designation of specific duties to certain personnel and departments. It also defines their functions and specifies the links between personnel and departments.

In a clinical setting, diagrams, operating guides, and tables promote coordination of the staff, departments, and customers. However, it is difficult to keep them up to date and they give subtle coordination in fast growing, expanding, and dynamic enterprises. Another major cause of failure is delegation if authority to subordinates. A good delegator gives the ideas of subordinates a chance, allows the staff to make mistakes and learn from them, gives other subordinates the power to make decisions, and formulates an effective transfer of information over subordinates.

Behavioral leadership theory focuses on analyzing behaviors or actions that describe a style of leadership. With this aspect, leaders are required to work with a specific category of style that relies on their methods and actions used to fulfill the goals (Egner, 2009). However, the choice of suitable leadership criteria relies on the values and objectives of the individual making the evaluation, but different individuals have diverse values. Thus, the best approach is to include several criteria when researching on leadership effectiveness.

Egner (2009) recommends four criteria for leadership effectiveness. They include individual leader effectiveness, follower job fulfillment, follower fulfillment with leader, and group performance. The first criteria enables the assessment of the leader at an individual level on overall effectiveness. The second and third criteria enable coordination among the leaders and staff while group performance enables monitoring of all employees as a single unit.

Consequently, management also has to be made systematic by combining it with hub clinical procedures. For this to occur, leaders need to identify significant points in each project and ensure that the stakeholders are actively engaged. For the staff, formulation of unit councils is important to help them acquire a voice and make decisions. Furthermore, since clinical work involved listening and responding to patient issues, the staff should adopt a variety of qualities like good communication skills, good clarity and perception of the local language including community dynamics, and an answer oriented approach (Egner, 2010). Furthermore, respect and open-mindedness for the views of other eligible staff and a genuine obligation to individual position and organization goals are also important.

Conclusion

Generally, efficient and effective clinical practice requires the leaders to work together with the staff and stakeholders. If this can be integrated with proper management functions and behavioral leadership, then work will run smoothly and any arising problems will be easy to get rid of. Consequently, the staff should realize that they are all eligible in making crucial decisions regarding a patient’s well being and survival, thus they should not only rely on their leaders to make decisions although the final word should be the latter.

References

Egner, T. (2009). Behavioral Leadership – The Managerial Grid. München: GRIN Verlag GmbH.

Lutz, E. (2010). The functions of Management, Retrieved from,< http://www.cfa.ilstu.edu/pguithe/the345/am1c.html> Accessed December 11, 2012