A. You are the newly appointed CEO of a 300-bed community hospital in the Midwes

Question

A.

You are the newly appointed CEO of a 300-bed community hospital in the Midwest. During your first week on duty, your board president and your chief of medical staff both express the same concern to you about the hospital staff: They just don’t seem to be very motivated in performing their duties these days. Quality of care and patient satisfaction are suffering as a result.

What will you do to set about improving motivation within your healthcare professional team? Explain at least three specific motivational strategies that you will try, and also explain how you will know if your strategies have worked.

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B.

As a healthcare leader, you will need to work effectively with the thinking in your organization, and that can be challenging. To get staff members to think in the right ways for your organization to be successful, well, it takes work and finesse!

How will you work with thinking in your own healthcare facility? Discuss the role of thinking processes in organizational change and learning. How will you, as a healthcare manager, use thinking to bring about positive change for your own facility?

Explanation / Answer

Motivation to healthcare professional

Motivation level of staff is intrinsic to achievement of organization goals. Individual motivation is the result of a process that energizes, directs and sustains the individual behavior. It is the willingness of staff to exert different level of efforts as required for the successful delivery of organization expectations and satisfying existing needs.

As the concern expressed by the board president and the chief of medical staff on the low level of motivation among the hospital staff, it would be imperative to find out, at first, the reasons of such low level of motivation.

So before setting out about improving the motivation within the healthcare professional team I would find out what actually had been happening that have driven staff to such lower level of motivation? I would set out the informal meeting at various levels of staff to find out their needs, understand the values they hold, their attitudes, what they find rewarding, their understanding of organizations expectations from them and sufficiency of their corresponding efforts.

With insight obtained from above feedback, I would set out to improve the motivation level by applying motivational strategies to identified key success motivational. Key motivational factors that I would like to work on are

I would initially intervene to provide more autonomy to staff at work by job redesign and job enrichment, giving them responsibility for clearly defined tasks, and feedback and recognition of the job done. The manages can design clear job descriptions, set clear standards for performance, give regular feedback, and design appropriate selection and recruitment criteria. Having a clear job description will ensure that workers are aware of organizational goals, and of the role which they are expected to perform in achieving these goals.

Second, bringing in culture of teamwork and designing self-managing teams would bring performance improvement through increased productivity. Teamwork will effectively use skills and competencies of professional groups leading to improvement in quality of patient care.

Third, bringing performance linked reward system through various packages of intrinsic rewards such as salaries, bonuses, promotions, and performance related pay and extrinsic rewards such as training opportunities. Supervision and performance assessment processes will be established to ensure that corrective feedback on performance are captured and provided to workers.

Thinking

Different workers may comprehend a situation differently from the actual facts of the situation. In these situations, the thinking principles can help to work with perceived realities and bring common understanding in the organization. Thinking refers to the mental processes involved in in attending to information, processing information, and ordering information to create meaning that is the basis for acting, learning, and other human activities.

Common understanding among the organization members can be accomplished by remedying the limitation of person and organizational thinking through discussion and conversation. This I would achieve by motivating workers to make them available for thinking process by sharing their assumptions and perceived realities. Workers would thus be encouraged to refashion their own mental constructs and conceptions and facilitate common mental frameworks and shared understanding within an organization.

Organizational behavior is intrinsically tied up to thinking. The behavior cannot be understood without understanding the thoughts, assumptions, perceptions and attributes of a situation that precede behavior and its consequences. Cognitive (thinking) science has taught us that information processing capacities and mental processes shape and govern one's perceptions, language, and, ultimately, one's behaviors. A focus on thinking highlights the importance of perceptions, assumptions, and social cues. It points out biases in information processing and creating common meaning during communication. Thinking brings the change in the human and organization capacity to adapt is rooted in new ways of thinking and acting. Thinking thus creates common understanding among organization members.

By thinking process, the effective healthcare manager can work with organization members and constituents to make sense of their interactions and experiences and agree upon meaning so they can work together, learn, make decisions, and take action to bring necessary organizational change. Thus, instead of assuming meaning is clear, the manager can examine and test mental models and assumptions about the organizational world in order to increase shared understanding among members. Bias is inherent to human thinking; the manager can reduce bias through skillful collective communication and problem solving by sharing mental representations and beliefs, with others through questioning, discussion, and debate and bring positive change. With clear communication and problem-solving skills, the healthcare manager can successfully working with thinking in organizations.

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