Question: Organizational Development
Propose strategies for developing management staff, medical staff, and governing body/board in a learning organization. What do you foresee as the obstacles you will face? How will you handle potential conflicts that arise when implementing change toward becoming a learning organization? Your initial post should be at least 300 words. Support your response with a minimum of two scholarly sources.
This week, Discussion 1: asks students to propose strategies for developing management staff, medical staff, and governing body/board in a learning organization. There are slightly different strategies for developing management staff, medical staff, and governing body/board written under 10.2 Organizational Development.
Change is occurring rapidly. Organizations continue encountering even greater rates of change through their dynamic environments. Managing the resources for sustained performance has become increasingly difficult. Organization's success and effectiveness highly depend on leaders' possessing an appropriate balance of skills, competencies, and capabilities (Breton, Lamothe, & Jean-Louis, 2014; Schermerhorn, Osborn, Uhl-Bien, & Hunt, 2012). In this regard, leadership development has become the hottest topic in organizations around the world. To navigate the world's rapidly changing economic, social, technological, and political dynamics, leaders must become better educated to take on challenges effectively and ethically. Nevertheless, most organizations do not have leadership talent required to establish a competitive advantage.
Organizations can acquire needed leadership by either recruiting leaders from outside or building leadership talent (Frates, 2014; Schermerhorn et al., 2012). Recruiting leaders from outside seems to save huge cost in human resources development. In fact, organizations can benefit more in the long run if they build a pipeline of leaders. Organizations can nurture their next generation leaders in line with their own culture, requisite skills, and strategic agenda (Swearingen, 2009). As such, in response to today's complex environment, organizations should not only proactively build future leaders, but also accelerate the development of current leaders.
Leadership development programs are educational interventions designed to address and improve the leadership capabilities of individuals. Organizations ought to make use of leadership development as a platform for driving change by strengthening the ability of both present and future leaders to increase long-term organizational performance through more effective leadership (McAlearney & Bulter, 2008; Schermerhorn et al., 2012; Swearingen, 2009). Research study conducted by McAlearney and Bulter (2008) revealed that effective leadership development can improve healthcare quality and efficiency as a consequence of reduced turnover and related expenses and increased caliber of the workforce. In Wong and Cummings's (as cited in Swearingen, 2009) study, the results confirmed that lower quality of nursing leadership leads to higher nursing turnover and lower healthcare quality, which, ultimately, results in more adverse patient events.
Leadership development has become an important way to implement change in the organizations, and, increasingly, in-house programs are more likely to dominate the corporate development agenda (Grandy & Holton, 2013; Swearingen, 2009; Schermerhorn et al., 2012). However, it is important to ask whether organizations can develop accurate contingency models of leadership to reflect today's complex world. Another question is that whether leaders can reap the benefits of training and develop sufficient versatility in their skills and behavioral repertories in order to lead the change and cope with the changing circumstances.