Behavior and Leadership Dynamics in Healthcare: Kaiser Permanente

Role of Behavior and Leadership Dynamics in Healthcare: Kaiser Permanente
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Role of Behavior and Leadership Dynamics in Healthcare: Kaiser Permanente
Introduction
Kaiser Permanente forms part of the largest non-profit health plan in addition to being the largest integrated healthcare delivery system in the United States. The company is praised for its revolutionary systems that have enabled it to care for more than 12 million people across different regions (Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), 2016). With innovation at its core, the organization has grown over time to improve the quality of healthcare. Furthermore, with more than 175,000 employees, the organization presents a complex system that requires proper management and leadership to maintain its status.
Behavior models and leadership dynamics
The supportive model bases its importance on the role of employees in the organization. Therefore, employees are self-motivated in this case hence can work efficiently to support the organization's goals and objectives. In this case, leaders provide support and facilitation for the employees to create conducive environments for them to work. Kaiser Permanente embodies this behavior model with its support for employees and quests to make them better in their jobs. For instance, the organization developed the KP Improvement Institute to assist in training employees to improve service delivery (Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), 2016).
The leadership, on the other hand, took a proactive measure to ensure the company was profitable despite challenges. Leadership dynamics must be in place to ensure that any types of errors are reduced or eradicated to increase performance. The organization was able to halve its hospital standardized mortality ratio (HSMR) over time due to leadership influences that focused on quality care. Despite the organization's large size and huge workforce, it was possible to achieve this goal mainly due to the leadership style employed in the organization.
Group and team dynamics
Large and complex systems likely produce problems for organizations, and this was the case in Kaiser Permanente, especially with the different regional branches that the company possessed. This led to a multitude of different approaches and divergent views on tackling performance management. The group dynamics, in this case, affected performance and required intervention to improve service delivery. Consequently, the introduction of the KP Improvement Institute created a unified model that would be appropriate for Kaiser Permanente and would work all across the board (Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), 2016). Therefore, while the organization did not impose a single system on the regional branches, it found a middle ground through which all positive aspects were maintained. Through this method, the leadershi...