Health Care Organizational Culture Essay
The chief executive officer (CEO) of a well-established health care organization has brought the organization into a period of sustained stability and profitability. However, the CEO was recently and unexpectedly released by the Board of Directors amid rumors of impropriety on the part of the CEO. You have been hired as the new CEO. During the interview process, you anecdotally assessed the culture of the organization and believe a cultural shift is in order. The magnitude of the expected shift is unclear, and you have decided to approach the Board about conducting a lengthy and costly cultural assessment to help you plan for the expected changes in culture. At risk are the stability and profitability of the organization.Health Care Organizational Culture Essay
General Requirements:
Use the following information to ensure successful completion of the assignment:
Review the information in the module about the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) and the Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI).
This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.
Doctoral learners are required to use APA style for their writing assignments. The APA Style Guide is located in the Student Success Center.
This assignment requires that at least two additional scholarly research sources related to this topic, and at least one in-text citation from each source be included.Health Care Organizational Culture Essay
Directions:
Prepare a persuasive presentation (15-20 slides, exclusive of the reference list) that you could deliver to the Board of Directors explaining the rationale for and benefits of cultural assessment and your preferred assessment instrument. Speaker notes must be included for each slide. The presentation must do the following:
Provide a persuasive argument for performing a cultural assessment of the organization leading to the improvement of the current culture at the risk of temporary instability or short-term loss of profitability.
Provide a rationale for your choice of assessment instruments.
Sketch a timeline for the assessment process outlining the per-assessment communications, the assessment window, the data analysis period, and the post-assessment communications.
Deliver a specific request for Board approval of this plan.
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.Health Care Organizational Culture Essay
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
We have likely each lived the power of culture to support or derail our sincerest efforts to succeed. Recently, we have been reminded about the importance of culture when reviewing the results of the Beryl Institute’s 2017 Bench marking Study: The State of the Patient Experience 2017: A Return to Purpose. In their report of findings of over 1,600 respondents, organizational culture was cited as both the greatest organizational driver and roadblock to patient experience efforts. Specifically, thirty-six percent of respondents reported a positive organizational culture as the greatest driver of patient experience efforts and thirty-nine percent reported cultural resistance to doing many things differently as the greatest roadblock. Health Care Organizational Culture Essay
As Theodore Roosevelt so famously said, “do what you can, with what you have, where you are”. Organizational culture can serve as the number one influence r you can immediately impact to steer improved and lasting results. The Journal of Healthcare Leadership recently published the Culture Imperative in which high performing cultures statistically significantly outperformed low performing cultures on key balanced scorecard measures: Employee Engagement, Physician Engagement, Patient Experience, Value Based Purchasing, and Turnover.
Improving the healthcare experience cannot be left to chance or hope. There must be an everyday devotion to aligning and engaging the patients, caregivers, and communities to allow and promote the best possible care. The following attributes are demonstrated to yield high performing culture and may provide a better path forward to achieving your desired results. Health Care Organizational Culture Essay
• Treat patients and their loved ones as valued customers
• Hire and retain employees who have personal values that are similar to your organizational values
• Make it a daily ambition for employees to feel working at the organization is rewarding
• Make certain employees feel a sense of pride and ownership in the organization
Organizational culture is ‘how we do things round here’. It represents the collective values and beliefs of the people who work in the organization and is influenced by its history, its primary task, key individuals, management strategy, external constraints and circumstances. It can be observed in how the organization presents itself and the values behind it can be discerned through the behavior and attitudes of individuals. Organizational culture runs deep and may not be explicit or even always consciously determined.
Often organizations are adept at ‘doing the right things’, ticking the boxes and setting out their values. What is less obvious is whether the hearts and minds of the people are fully behind the organization – whether there is alignment around the values and whether the culture is one in which the right sorts of values can flourish and take root. In the NHS we are looking for organizational cultures that put patients first, promote trust, respect and equality and are sufficiently open and transparent such that staff feel able to challenge each other robustly, regardless of status, without fear and are encouraged to come forward when difficulties arise. The recently published report by Sir Robert Francis, following the Freedom to Speak Up Review1, puts organizational culture to the foreground as a key determinant in what creates safe health care systems. He noted specifically the need for a culture of openness and learning where all staff feel able to voice concerns. His evidence showed that the issue of bullying and a coercive culture was a frequent concern for the staff who gave evidence.
Merely stating that the organization is committed to a set of values along the lines described doesn’t mean that they are the lived experience of the staff and patients. Francis also noted a disparity between espoused policies and the level of support given to staff. Many NHS trusts do have good program mes in place to embed values from board level to front line staff; induction, inset days, staff focus groups, regular communication, staff training and appraisal are all used to impart what the organization stands for, what it aspires to and what it expects of its staff and these can be evaluated fairly reliably. What we are looking for is an organizational culture where what is explicitly stated tallies with what staff think and feel and that what lies behind the rhetoric is a genuine desire to live out the values rather than simply to pass inspections. Health Care Organizational Culture Essay
Unspoken rules and unconscious behavior
At a surface level it is relatively easy to describe an organizations culture and it can be observed overtly in terms of the mission statement and what goes on the website, and more implicitly in the staff behaviors that they explicitly seek to inculcate. At its deeper level however, organizational culture is sometimes difficult to discern and even more difficult to change, precisely because it is hidden and may rely on unspoken rules. Many of these unspoken rules may exist without the conscious knowledge of the membership. Examples of this might be, ‘we don’t tell on our colleagues’; ‘we can’t challenge senior medical staff’, or perhaps there is a mutually understood sense of an in-group and an out-group. Skein describes theses as ‘tacit assumptions’, they are often unconscious and don’t show up in staff surveys or casual conversations, but can de-rail the best rational plans and strategy, they can be the source of paradox, resistance to change and conflict and can result in behaviors such as bullying and harassment, a high level of grievance, unexplained absence and high staff turnover. Francis advocates a zero tolerance approach to bullying. Understanding why bullying is happening – what may be behind it – is also vital.
A significant determinant of such unconscious behavior is anxiety. Anxieties can stem from concerns about job status, pay, security, all of which affect self-worth. Anxiety is also associated with the particular job that people do, their role – and in the NHS many tasks are complex, difficult and involve intimate contact with patients or involve hearing about distressing things. There are also new requirements to merge and integrate services; this necessitates making new relationship across institutional boundaries and securing agreement in a competitive environment. There are currently unprecedented pressures on the NHS to make savings at the same time as improving services. All such pressures activate the unconscious aspects of organizational culture and irrational behavior, counter to the values of the organization, can follow. The implications of the Francis report are that staff need access to mediation, counseling, coaching and mentoring. We would strongly support this with the proviso that individual measures do not detract from the need to consider the cultural/ systemic implications when things go wrong.
Organizations need to be reliable containers for the emotions of their staff members; to create a context in which it is possible for staff to acknowledge the impact that the work is having and to feel listened to when their working situation becomes stressful or at worst, intolerable. They should provide opportunities for staff to feel valued and supported in the work that they do and, particularly for clinicians, promote a context where the complexities of clinical work can be openly grappled with, rather than closing down discussions or seeking premature solutions. Health Care Organizational Culture Essay
It is a truism that organizational culture starts with the board. A board that models open communication, trust and respect for its members, which pays attention to the quality of its working relationships and values these attributes is likely to promote behaviors that exemplify them in the workforce. Francis also refers to the importance of the involvement of the board of directors being closely involved in monitoring the organizations culture, supporting senior managers particularly in handling concerns. Health Care Organizational Culture Essay
Organizational culture is defined as “the way things are done” within an organization (Certo, 2006). The ways an organization conducts its business, treats its employees, allows freedom in decision-making, and manages the flow of information all help build culture. Researchers define organizational culture as the set of shared values and beliefs that employees hold and that determine how they perceive, think about, and react to the organization’s various environments (Schein, 1996). Made up of its members’ shared beliefs, values, symbols, and behaviors, organizational culture guides individual decisions and actions on an unconscious level. It can be observed and manifested in an organization’s climate. Culture defines attitudes and work patterns that must be recognized to enhance effort and performance. Studies show that organizational culture can impact employees’ motivation, satisfaction, and turnover, and can be a source of competitive advantage (Guinto, 2006). It is, therefore, important to understand an organization’s culture and how it helps support business goals.
Every organization’s culture is unique. A healthcare facility with collaborative culture may emphasize teamwork, while a more controlled culture thrives on structure and stability. Culture based on competition needs to operate openly and adapt to change quickly; creative culture, meanwhile, fosters innovation, risk-taking, and individual initiative. The culture of a newly acquired hospital may well differ from the culture of the parent organization. Since each culture type differs in its goals and purposes (Certo, 2006), it is imperative for corporate leadership to understand its own culture as well as the culture of the newly acquired hospital. A mismatch between the two may interfere with achieving corporate goals and be counterproductive; thus, this issue needs special attention. By introducing the existing corporate culture at the new hospital, an organization will not only become more efficient, but also gain competitive advantage in the industry. Health Care Organizational Culture Essay
An organization’s mission and values are important factors in identifying and understanding its culture. Companies intentionally publish their mission and values in an attempt to shape their company culture for the better. Leaders at the corporate level must ensure employees know what the company stands for and believes in. The mission emphasizes why the company exists, and the values help guide employees’ behavior. For example, a mission statement may pledge to provide comprehensive, quality healthcare in a convenient, compassionate, and cost-effective manner. Health Care Organizational Culture Essay