The current healthcare professionals are increasingly becoming vulnerable to bias decisions and thus the need to ensure that the choices made are ethical and backed up with the needed leadership skills. The professional keeps on changing in terms of financial constraints, increased consumer expectations, the need to improve patients’ and employees’ welfare among many other factors which necessitate a need to come up with sound leadership techniques that can be used to confront the dynamic environment (Herd, Adams-Pope, Bowers & Sims, 2016). Subsequently, this paper seeks to address the issue by focusing on a given scenario and how a given leadership style was applied strategically to reduce its impacts on the organization.
The case scenario presented below is a classic experience that took place in a local hospital. In this regard, the setting of the scene is in a well-known hospital which is highly specialized in offering expert treatment to various medical conditions. As a result, the hospital work throughout the day and even through the nights. Normally, nurses and doctors are rotated on the shifts so that each of them has the chance to serve on the day or night shifts over time. Due to the nature and quality of the services offered by the hospital, many people prefer to seek treatment from there especially for terminal and chronic illness such as heart conditions among many others.
In order to maintain seemingly attractive and decision working conditions within the health facility, the hospital leadership has drafted some policies which should define the code of conduct for its employees throughout their practice at the health center. The policies are meant to promote ethical behavior and decisions made by the nurses and doctors to effectively deliver on their responsibility and expectations.
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One of the policies that have been well documented in the employee handbook is the manner in which employees should show their commitment in attending to patients during the night shift. The hospital leadership states that it is highly unethical and cannot be allowed for nurses or doctors to sleep while on the duty at night. This is to avoid medical errors which can cause death and other losses that can significantly startle the hospital or ruin its reputation. To implement these policies, the leader doctor on the shift is allowed to be in charge and supervise all operations in each of the department throughout the night while giving the necessary consultations where needed.
One day while executing her supervisory work at night, the lead nurse was alarmed by reports of a frequent nurse who would play down her role in the cardiac department and sleep risking the lives of vulnerable patients. It was revealed that the nurse used to sleep frequently and went unnoticed for a long period of time. It was shocking that this could happen at the examination table which was key in diagnosing and checking on patients’ health and it was considered extremely unethical to be found sleeping in such a place.
While acting on tip-top information gathered about the growing cases of nurses sleeping on the examining table in one of the critical department in the hospital, the lead nurse was convinced that she had to do it by herself and prove the information she had obtained. In the late night, she undertook her usual surveillance of the hospital and when she reached the cardiac department, she was surprised to find the nurse sleeping on the examination table.
The revelation was shocking because it was punishable since the nurse neglected her duty in one of the critical department at the health center. The issues at hand were now for the lead manager to find the reason why the nurse continually slept on duty, accepts her mistake and either be punished based on the work policies. This was key in curbing the proliferation of such behavior in the future and there was a need to change the nurse behavior. Proper leadership skills were expected to be displayed in handling such fragile case.
Leadership is the capacity of an individual to set goals or direction and motivate the people who follow him towards its achievement. In most cases, leaders are known to be highly inspirational as they are required to convince and inspire followers to peruse a certain direction or objective that has been set by their leader (Herd et al., 2016).
Transactional leadership theory asserts that leaders have the ability to reward and punish those who do not comply with their command. In cases followers fail to achieve the set targets, the leaders will have to punish them by either reducing their pay, allowances or even bonuses. Those supporters who excel and contribute significantly to the attainment of goals are likely to be praised, recognized and praised.
In reference to the case scenario, after the lead nurse found that the nurse was sleeping while on the duty, she immediately summoned her the following day. The purpose was for her to explain the reasons why she slept while on the night shift when she knew that it was not allowed and that her cation threatened the health of many patients who were there to seek medication for their conditions. Some of the responses that the affected nurse gave which led to her sleeping on duty at night was in reference to their motivation.
According to her, the hospital had done less to motivate them and used to pay them less the market prices for the work they use to do at night. Sometimes, she complained that overtime work was hardly paid despite there being an agreement to pay for overtime under special conditions (Hargett et al., 2017). She also protested that she felt they were overworked because the hospital had a serious shortage in nurses and this increased workload which was highly unattainable and left her fully exhausted. Such was the convincing reasons she gave that led her to sleep on the work. Prior to her defense, the lead nurses quoted from the employee handbook policies which state that all hospital employees were prohibited from sleeping at night while on duty and in cases such happens it would be punishable by a three-week suspension without pay (Hargett et al., 2017).
Being a transactional healthcare leader, the lead nurse was fully persuaded that employees are supposed to be rewarded or their work and punished for their mistake in order to comply with the policies that the hospital has set (Herd et al., 2016). Therefore, after the defense made by the affected nurse, the lead nurse was not satisfied and rubbished it as excuses which were against the hospital policies. The affected nurse was given a three-week suspension without pay after which she was required to report back to her work station.
The lead nurse based her decision on some of the nursing theories and models such as the Moral Development Theory which was developed by Lawrence Kohlberg (Winston & Fields, 2015). The theory states that an individual, especially nurses have the chance differentiating between what is bad and right (Hargett et al., 2017). The theory expects nurses to take the right choices and avoid engaging in risky behavior such as sleeping while on duty as demonstrated by the affected nurse. The theory is based on the morality of the nurse and their consequent actions.
According to the theory, a leader who is transformational in nature is likely to allow their followers to find inherent motivational factors that can drive them toward the common goals. The use of this theory creates a strong sense of trust, admiration, fidelity, and respect for the leaders and the followers. In most cases, transformational leaders have the following features: they have a high sense of individual consideration towards the followers, they are strongly backed by intellectual stimulation which helps to ground their concepts, they are highly inspirational to motivate followers towards the set objective and have a great sense of influence. This is key in convincing them to be committed towards a specific direction (Winston & Fields, 2015).
The application of transformational leadership style in this scenario would have resulted in a more different outcome (Hargett et al., 2017). For instance, through transformational leadership, the lead manager would be concerned with addressing some of the problems that the nurse claimed to be causing her to sleep while on duty (Banks, McCauley, Gardner & Guler, 2016). The lead nurse would have learned that there were some contributing causes which needed to be addressed and bring a new change in the work schedule and the entire employee management (Amanchukwu, Stanley & Ololube, 2015).
For instance, the lead nurse would have noted the concerned is raised about nurse shortage which increases workload. Secondly, the issue with motivation is key in attaining maximum commitment from employees and the lead nurse would have taken the issue serious than suspending the nurse for three weeks without pay (Nawaz & Khan, 2016). Compared to transactional leadership, in a transformational leadership style, the lead manager would have capitalized on some of the issues that the nurse raised and offer a conducive environment by working on their motivation, workload and the overtime payment issue (Nawaz & Khan, 2016).
Through transformational style, the nurse was suspended and nothing was done to solve the contributing factors to her sleeping while on duty at night (Amanchukwu et al., 2015). There are higher chances that her motivation is still very low and the probability of the same mistake happing is high since nothing was solved (Herd et al., 2016). If transformational leadership style was used, then the leadership at the hospital would have looked into different way through which nurses will be motivated, reduce workload, compensate them fairly and bring changes that make nurse work more enjoyable to obtain their commitment.
