Essay about Leadership Within Ambulance Services

Leadership is increasingly important in today's society. Many experts and scholars point out that the current leadership crisis concerns moral and character problems in many leaders (Ahn, Ettner, & Loupin, 2012; Callahan, 2004; Wright & Quick, 2011). The following interview report is intended primarily for exploration and comparison of the traits and characteristics of leadership. A leader of a clinical medicine centre was interviewed for this report. The purpose of this report is to explore the leadership characters and traits, and how they can be developed in this turbulent environment. First, I make a brief introduction regarding the background of the respondent and her working environment. The report also describes this

This reflective essay is based on the personal SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats) analysis, to examine my leadership potential. It will define leadership within context of the NHS leadership as well as highlight some of the current incidents relate to poor leadership. Additionally, it will briefly discuss some of the relevant leadership theories that can be applied to nursing practice whilst exploring my own leadership style. Lastly, this essay will reflect the scenario from practice to support my “strengths” and “weakness” whilst developing a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound) goal plan to address one of my weakness and then the conclusion will be drawn summarising the key points within the essay.

Culture is defined as all of humans’ perception, knowledge, opinions, worth and sensation studied through joining in any cultural system (Nanda & Warms, 2011). In other word, human is the represent of culture (O’Donnell & Boyle,2008, pp.4-14). The dimension of culture is the centre in all aspects of organizational life, especially in business (Nanda & Warms, 2011). For example, the way employer of a company act, think or feel is controlled by their naturally cultural belief (REF). Values of an organisation can be changed effectively by organisational culture (REF).

“Organisations need strong culture”. Consider this statement in relation to how we understand and make sense of culture in the post-bureaucratic era.

“Managers with leadership styles that seek and value contributions from staff, promote a climate in which information is shared effectively, promote decision making at the staff nurse level, exert position power, and influence coordination of work to provide a milieu that maintains a stable cadre of nurses”, (Boyle, Bott, Hansen, Woods & Taunton, 2009). This statement describes the large impact a leadership style can make on the work environment, and the morale of the team. In nursing history, several theories and leadership

Once completing the quiz “What’s the Right Organisational Culture for Me?”(Robbins, DeCenzo, Coulter & Woods, p. 46), I found that my personal score of 24 placed me in this more humanistic style of organisational culture. According to Robbins et al (2016, p. 46), scores more than 22 “indicate a preference for informal, humanistic, flexible and innovative cultures”. The quiz itself looked into the seven main pinpoint of organisational culture; “innovation and risk-taking, attention to detail, outcome orientation, people orientation, aggressiveness and stability.” I think that organisational culture is integral to the businesses productivity because of its ability to reflect communal shared values, principles, traditions, and practices that influence the way an organisation’s employees and other members conduct themselves.

This essay aims to define and analyse the leadership within the context of the NHS and specifically in the nursing profession. Further, this assignment will highlight some of the current incidents of poor leadership within the Health service. It will then briefly discuss some of the leadership theories whilst exploring my own leadership style along with rationale. SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats) analysis will be conducted to identify my leadership potential, which will be included in the Appendix1. Additionally, this essay will reflect the scenario from practice where I have demonstrated my “strengths” and “weakness”. Lastly, this essay will develop SMART goal plan to address my weakness and then the conclusion will be drawn summarising the key points within the essay.

This paper will review an article by Elizabeth Curtis and Rhona O’Connell in Nurse Management-UK. “Essential leadership skills for motivating and developing staff” reviews the importance of leadership skill and empowering staff (Curtis & O'Connell, 2011). This article discusses the effect manager has on the staff they supervise, and how a negative attitude can produce negative results; whereby a positive and supportive environment can produce staff

This particular organisation is the NHS Hospital Trust, and is based in the medical industry. The results from the case study highlighted the leadership issues, causes of failure within the work environment, lack of effective management systems, cultural and strategic factors, and financial factors of the organisation. In evaluating all these causes that contribute to organisational failure due to inefficient leadership recognition and implementation, attitudes of individuals and leaders also contribute to the negative outcome of company and staff morale. The many strengths on this body of work include the structure of analysis in identifying leadership issues into categories to better explain the reasons for NHS’ leadership failure.

There are many definitions of organisational culture available in the literature, many of which are based on the fact that culture consists of values, beliefs, and assumptions shared by the majority of members of an organisation. These characteristics and shared views are then translated into common and repeated patterns of behaviour. Although it is difficult to come up with a single definition that would cover

An organisation’s culture relates to a set of shared beliefs and values that has been agreedby the entire group and thus representing the company’s unique identity. They reflect theorganisation’s core values which are learned, re-learned and passed on to new members.These include the way people communicate with one another, how information isexchanged, the procedures and processes followed etc. Roger Harrison defined four typesof organisational culture depending on the level of centralisation and formalisation. Thisis indicated in the figure

Managers and leaders do have similarities but at the same time they also have important differences. In healthcare organizations managers and leaders strive hard to change employees’ attitudes from an ‘agrarian or craft-tradition’ mindset to high performance organization mindset. A manager emphasizes rationality and control,

Researchers have adopted various frameworks to define the organisational cultures. The models that have been developed by some researchers to describe various indicators of organisational culture are as follows.

Organisational culture is defined as “the set of beliefs, values and assumptions that members of an organization share in common.” (Rao, Rao and Sivaramakrishna, 2008, p. 448). Handy (1985) characterised organisational culture into four types of structure- the Greek Temple, the Spider’s Web, the Cluster and the Matrix. These are often referred to as Role Culture, Power Culture, Person Culture and Task Culture. It could be argued that the description of Role Culture, as relying on committees, structures, schedules and analysis (Rao, Rao and Sivaramakrishna, 2008) is the most applicable to a retail organisation. Although these are the four main types of organisational culture, a criticism of Handy’s work is that more than one type of culture usually exists within the same organisation, moreover, organisations usually change over time- suggesting their organisational culture may also change. As culture appears to be an ever-expanding research area and retail appears to be an ever-changing culture, it may be more applicable to analyse the culture of Next Plc via the 7-S Framework, developed by The McKinsey Organisation (Waterman, Peters and Phillips, 1980). This model asks seven questions, focusing on the style, structure, skills, systems, strategy, staff and shared values of the organisation. As a retail store, the strategy of Next Plc is based largely on their products and meeting customer-needs; to achieve this, customers can order products online and in-store, reserve products and receive text message notifications when their order is ready for collection. Next Plc has a divisional organisational structure- although most of their stores are in the United Kingdom and Ireland, they have 200 stores in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. They can therefore be considered as a tall structure with multiple levels of staff. The systems used include employee recruitment and development, managing customer relationships and

Existing culture can in times be very hard to continue with because of the change in the growth or in the strategic change in the organisation. At such appropriate web of culture is important to be identified or that can be a problem in the progress of the organisation. These identified elements will give organisation a bigger picture of what was going wrong and how can they change it towards betterment of the organisation.