Leadership in Health Care: Evolution of Leadership

Leadership in Health Care
Name
Institution of affiliation
Date
Leadership in Health Care
RN Amanchukwu in her study conceived leadership to be the ability to provide direction for a given group of people and to elicit the desire to achieve a common purpose for the benefit of the group (Amanchukwu, 2015). Leadership is particularly critical in the health care system. Health care is a sensitive industry noting that it deals directly with human life. Thus, there is a need for continued, sustained leadership in the sector to ensure it consistently delivers top-notch health care to those in need (West, 2015). There is thus a need to have a comprehensive understanding of leadership in health care. The paper works towards this understanding by dissecting the subject matter of leadership. The paper asks key questions and in determining the answers, a framework for leadership and how it can be learned is effectively developed.
Evolution of Leadership
In the middle ages as the European nations were being formed, good leaders had to have the ability to provide clear, concise orders and the capability to ensure these orders were followed. As the nation states emerged, authoritative leadership i.e. (autocratic and directive leadership) was essential. This form of leadership would, however, become diluted after misuse. The most prominent attack on this form of leadership would be the Magna Carta (Stiffner, 2015). The charter established a participative form of leadership. Business would in later centuries take on the authoritative form of leadership. Business leaders favored the top down approach, noting that it required less consultation and faster implementation (Carmeli, 2014). However, emerging concepts and technologies have rendered this form of leadership irrelevant. In the modern workplace, creativity and innovation are given much more attention that the implementation of organization strategies (Reisman, 2015). Thus, the modern leader must make room for creativity to create new products and imagine new ways to do business. In Health care, the participative form of leadership allows every individual to provide potential solutions to a given problem. Thus, the odds of solving the problem are exponentially increased.
Leadership compared to management
The concepts of leadership and management have drawn discourse from scholars for decades. These concepts while inherently separate are inexplicably linked. In the past, a manager could have thrived without being a leader e.g. a supervisor in a factory making boots did not need to give much thought to the end use of the product or the employees. In the modern world, a manager and a leader must consistently add value to the organization they are working (Chuang, 2013). Key differences between leadership and management include; leadership is people oriented while management is task oriented, management focuses on directing and controlling while leadership focuses on motivation and influence, management demands results while leadership requires achievement, leadership facilitates work while management is involved in it, and leadership appeals to the hearts of the people while management appeals to their minds (Chuang, 2013).
Leadership Trait Theory
The trait theory rests...