The Leadership Debate in the Medical Field Essay

Introduction

Every organization, including laboratory settings, seeks to cultivate and benefit from excellent leadership, but the need for placing an accent on people or results requires proper analysis and priority-setting. A people-centered leader is destined to succeed, considering that most of the activities leaders engage in require consideration of those under their guidance. In a laboratory, collaboration is very crucial for success to be attained. When hiring someone for a leadership position, I would definitely look for an empathetic professional capable of resolving conflicts and inspiring the followers to overcome minor misunderstandings easily. Regarding my personality, some inclinations that I naturally possess, including empathy, emotional openness, and approachability, support me in being a successful people-oriented leader in my current workplace. This paper presents arguments for emphasizing the people-focused side, thus justifying my adherence to people-orientedness in the leadership debate.

Arguments for the People-Oriented Approach to Medical/Laboratory Leadership

People-Orientedness Maximizes a Sense of Direction

• People-focused leadership strategies in laboratory settings increase such environments’ goal orientation and workforce management due to placing employee development purposes at the heart of the leadership structure (Tomáška et al., 2020).
• People-centered leaders offer guidance and direct the organization’s workforce while also aligning the latter’s behaviors with the predetermined corporate objectives and goals (Tomáška et al., 2020).

People-Orientedness Can Battle Turnover by Increasing Employee Satisfaction

• The presence of people-centered leaders that establish a clear vision, demonstrate compassion, and are forthright and honest with the staff is predictive of higher employee satisfaction levels (Godinho et al., 2020).
• Since insufficient job satisfaction fuels turnover intentions in all fields, including healthcare and laboratory contexts, people-focused leadership might be conducive to more successful staff retention practices (Godinho et al., 2020).

People-Oriented/Empathetic Leadership Improves Employee Morale

• Based on organizational experiments in virological laboratory settings, the leader’s efforts to welcome and acknowledge team members’ emotions are conducive to employees’ positive attitudes to the workplace (Ivan et al., 2022).
• Over 92% of laboratory employees agree that team development efforts based on acknowledging employees’ feelings, desires, and emotional needs effectively promote relaxation, improving stress resilience and attitudes to the employer (Ivan et al., 2022).
• According to laboratory teams, well-planned empathetic leadership efforts incite an array of positive emotions, including “affection, pride, and belonging,” which could be positive for the workplace’s emotional culture (Ivan et al., 2022, p. 88).
• Workplace events to practice empathetic leadership can enable laboratory employees to comprehend and voice their work-related expectations peculiar to the upcoming accounting periods (Ivan et al., 2022).
• People-based leaders do not hesitate to inspire and uplift their employees, promoting a sense of hope and helping them to battle depressive symptoms and deal with stress (Liang et al., 2020).
• Overall, orientedness toward employees and their emotional comfort rather than factual results can promote laboratory staff members’ more positive perceptions of their workplace.

People-Focused Leadership, the Sense of Unity, and Better Employee Coordination

• Achieving unity among medical employees is a crucial and challenging task due to intercultural differences and the existence of multiple perspectives on workplace processes or communication patterns; proper leadership efforts are required to resolve differences (Godinho et al., 2020).
• To foster unity and positive communication, leadership strategies should recognize and address misconceptions on the basis of socio-economic, cultural, religious, and psychological differences.
• Task-focused/result-focused leadership can involve underestimating rather than delving into the aforementioned issues, promoting the avoidance of open conflict instead of its active resolution.
• Welcoming employees’ emotions in virological laboratories can increase the quality of intra-professional and inter-professional communication by causing better integration and mutual understanding (Ivan et al., 2022).
• Inviting laboratory employees to acknowledge and work on their emotions can shed light on intercultural differences and culture-specific aspects of emotional expression, helping to build tolerance and the acceptance of diversity within teams (Ivan et al., 2022).
• In medical settings, people-oriented leadership instrumentalizes employee management and conflict resolution knowledge, thus being capable of removing barriers to optimal employee coordination (Liang et al., 2020).

Positive Effects on Employee Accountability

• In spite of being focused on employees’ well-being, people-oriented or empathetic leadership is conducive to better control over task accomplishment, making it beneficial for both results and subjective satisfaction (Cherizard, 2022).
• In laboratory managers, the “Ethical Leadership at Work” questionnaire scores are positively linked to accountability behaviors among staff members, revealing the need for people-based leadership research in laboratory environments (Cherizard, 2022, p. 1).
• People-focused leaders that lead by example and promote moral standards reduce the prevalence of blame-shifting and irresponsibility for outcomes in laboratories (Cherizard, 2022).
• Since an emphasis on ethics and people can be protective against responsibility avoidance among laboratory employees, it could also reduce organizational conflicts over role clarity, thus improving emotional environments (Cherizard, 2022).

Conclusion

To sum up, having personality traits that create an inclination toward people-based leadership, including high empathy and the avoidance of excessive emotional suppression, I am in favor of using the people-based approach in leading laboratory teams, and this position finds solid support in research. Current studies pertaining to medical and laboratory contexts connect employee-orientedness to goal orientation, organizational alignment, and higher employee satisfaction scores, having implications for retention. As opposed to task-orientedness, people-focused leadership can boost employee morale and accountability and offer means for maximizing intra-team unity and coordination through recognizing emotions. With that in mind, looking for empathetic and people-focused leaders in the medical field is a success-maximizing strategy.

References

Cherizard, C. M. D. (2022). Ethical leadership effects on medical laboratory personnel accountability behaviors (Publication No. 29213836) [Doctoral dissertation, Walden University]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

Godinho, M. A., Jonnagaddala, J., Gudi, N., Islam, R., Narasimhan, P., & Liaw, S. T. (2020). mHealth for integrated people-centered health services in the Western Pacific: A systematic review. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 142, 1-10. Web.

Ivan, L. R. D. S., Schwarcz, W. D., Barreira, A. P., & Lima, S. M. B. D. (2022). The benefits of empathetic leadership in the work environment: A case study: Laboratory of Virological Technology (LATEV). In International symposium on immunobiologicals (p. 88). Bio-Manguinhos. Web.

Liang, D., Mei, L., Chen, Y., Zhou, P., Yang, X., & Huang, J. (2020). Building a people-centered integrated care model in urban China: A qualitative study of the health reform in Luohu. International Journal of Integrated Care, 20(1), 1-11. Web.

Tomáška, L., Cesare, A. J., Al-Turki, T. M., & Griffith, J. D. (2020). Twenty years of t-loops: A case study for the importance of collaboration in molecular biology. DNA Repair, 94, 1-12. Web.