Management and Leadership in Higher Education - Essay Example

? Management and Leadership in Dentistry   Management and leadership have traditionally conceptualized as different yet related aspects at the workplace, with differentiated tasks and responsibilities for contemporary practitioners; whereas management entails coping with complexity by providing solutions, leadership on the other hand entails coping with change at the organization, in response to global industry dynamics.1 Management tasks include, but are not limited to, planning and budgeting, organizing and staffing, controlling and problem solving, while leadership is setting a direction for the organization through vision and strategy, aligning people to change, in addition to motivating and inspiring people to achieve high performance daily. Effective leaders gather relevant information and recognize patterns or trends, to establish vision and strategies to achieve competitiveness that will transform their organizations from their current state to a desired future state.2 Managers establish and control human systems to implement strategic plans by showing them in the right direction, while leaders motivate them by satisfying their basic needs for performance, thereby encouraging a sense of belonging, recognition, and self-esteem. Additionally, leadership involves people in the decision making process to achieve the vision through participative and transparency, thereby giving them a sense of control and engagement, providing coaching, feedback, besides, recognizing, and rewarding effort that is intrinsically motivating.3 Leadership and management approaches have a great impact service provision, including the quality of care delivered, support offered to other providers, and the overall success of the system; the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the management and leadership approaches in the dentistry context and practice setting. The dental care sector has become increasingly complex, with a great range of treatment modalities, presence of legislation affecting dental services, and increased patient expectations, increasing risks and likelihood of system failure.4 Besides, the dental care system requires a varied range of professions to work together in collaborative practice environments in the provision of services; including nurses, receptionists, technicians, cleaners, and therapists, as well as the dentists themselves; effective managers and leaders in dental care need skills to harness the potential of these professionals.5 Some of these skills include ability to communicate within the care team, with patients, and commissioners, ability to negotiate and resolve conflicts, and knowledge of risk management and its application to clinical governance. Dentists often envision working with people who derive pleasure from assisting one another and caring for their patients but that is never to be as a large proportion of dentists report staff-related issues as the leading stressor in their practices, something that is attributable to the lack of leadership training in dentistry.6 In that respect, lack of leadership training in dentistry makes it impossible for them to lead their teams, ensure a supportive work environment, and dealing with staff issues; a dentist’s leadership approach inevitably influences the dental care communication practices. Consequently, specific leadership behaviours affect the extent to which individuals identify with one another within teams in dental practice, interdependence, and social distance between the dental-care providers; in that case, there is a dire need to incorporate effective management and leadership approaches in dental care as seen in the creation of leadership development programs.7 The first management approach that can be applied in dental care is the situational or contingency approach, which examines managerial actions as reaction to a given set of environmental variables, suggesting that certain management alternatives are most suitable for particular situations.8 Leadership actions in dental care entail caring for people, setting direction of dental care providers in terms of vision, goals, priorities, and strategies, communicating to dental care providers effectively, embracing, and instilling a positive attitude, in addition to, remaining proactive, mentoring, and developing subordinates.9 Provision of effective dental care services largely depends on the collaborative efforts of dental care providers, thus, their welfare comes into play largely, and effective leaders must demonstrate their commitment to that end through both words and actions. Leaders need to show that they care about the people in dental care practice by empowering, inspiring, and supporting them to achieve even more; additionally, leaders must tell people what to do and how it is to be done to enable them achieve success on tasks.10 Delegation creates a sense of responsibility and engagement thereby enhancing their motivation to want success on the job for both intrinsic and extrinsic satisfaction; leaders should also give immediate feedback to the subordinates through performance appraisals to encourage desirable behaviours in dental care while discouraging unacceptable ones. Situational leadership is an effective approach that can be used by dentists to assess the development levels of their staff and the most effective leadership skills to best address those issues; similarly, situational leadership involves achieving success collaboratively through involvement of people in dental care.11 In that case, key competencies for effective situational leaders is the ability to diagnose people’s developmental level, flexibility in giving leadership that is appropriate to the situation, and partnering with the subordinates for utmost performance. The behavioural approach to management can also be applied in the evaluation of the human behaviour in dental care; this approach to management will focus on the human aspect of the dental care practice both from the interpersonal behaviour perspective (individual psychology), and from the group behaviour perspective (organizational behaviour). According to this approach, an organization is a social system, and many contingencies influence both the interpersonal and group behaviour of people at the workplace.12 Therefore, the goals of dental care services must be understood from the people part of dental care rather than from the business part because their performance is subject to workplace influences. Similarly, this approach recognizes the fundamental influence of the quality of leadership as a major determining factor in management success; group relations, behaviour, and individual psychology play a very significant role in influencing how a manager succeeds in management and must be taken into consideration. The human behaviour approach to management draws heavily from psychology and sociology, focuses on human relationships, and emphasizes higher performance through motivation and good human relations. Knowledge of organization behaviour inevitably enhances management in dental care because it enables managers to focus on the people in dental care rather than simply focusing on the business part of dental care provision and overlooking human dynamics. In so doing, effective managers of dental care should be able to influence quality of dental services by strengthening interpersonal relations and encouraging group behaviours through understanding and positive motivation. Closely relate to the human behaviour approach to management, and often confused with it, is the social systems approach, which perceives the organization as a culture system made up of people who work closely in cooperation with one another. The social systems theory, therefore, evaluates the inter-relationship of individuals with their social environments, thus provides the best theoretical foundation for the study of human communication. A social system is made up of individuals or groups of individuals who relate with one another and continuously influence each other’s behaviour, in addition to a set of interrelated activities, which collectively form a single unit. Both internal and environmental forces have an impact on social systems, and in turn, social systems react by accommodating and assimilating the change factors, by undergoing structural readjustments and alterations. In the dental care context, both the internal factors and environmental factors impose change dynamics on the practice, thus, creating challenges that need addressing; the social systems must be in harmony for the environment to respond positively to organizations. In that case, organizational goals can be achieved through a participative system of management that understands group dynamics or how individuals relate to one another in groups at the workplace. For managers to achieve success in the social system in which they operate in, they must consistently commit to recognizing and satisfying all the demands of that system rather than merely focusing on the business element of their organizations. The next approach that can be applied in dental care management is known as the systems approach, which mobilizes science and technology to provide solutions to complex issues in an objective, logical, complete, and in abidance to professional values and ethics. The systems approach depends on the cooperation of various teams of professionals on both the technological and non-technological aspects of the management problem to be addressed, and it entails a set of goals and a description of the strategy that will ensure efficiency in the flow of the system while solving the management challenge. The systems approach to management incorporates the application of sophisticated technologies and techniques for collecting data, making comparisons, making quantitative analyses, and logical predictions. This approach to management takes a reasoned and integrated outlook to management problems, and it is heavily biased towards rational, concrete judgments because it relies on the consideration of qualitative factors- doing the right things in a professional way, utilizing experience, talent, and logic, as well as facts and technologies. Managers in dental care can utilize the systems approach in analyzing problems, designing and evaluating suitable answers, demonstrating, and forecasting results from alternative approaches. Dentists can use this approach to management because it enables them to view dental care as part of a whole system, encouraging them to focus on effective communication and cooperation. Inevitably, this system enhances dentists’ capacity to make better decisions on resource allocation, make informed choices regarding dental care, thus, enhanced performance in terms of enhanced dental care. Dentists can also use the decision theory approach to management in managing complexities in dental care; this approach has a body of knowledge and related analytical techniques of varying levels of formality, which dentists can utilize in making decisions by choosing among alternative options after carefully weighing ramifications of each. The decisions theory approach can be applied in situations of uncertainty, risk, or even certainty; a decision under certainty present options each with a given known consequence, whereas a decision under uncertainty presents options that result to one or several consequences whose occurrence probability is unknown. Insofar as a decision under risk is concerned, options presented to managers will have one or several consequences whose probability of occurrence will be determinable; using this approach to management, unlike the systems approach, dentists do not dwell on defining objectives, designing alternatives or assessing consequences because they are predetermined. When making decisions under risk, individuals tend to maximize utility, therefore, dentists will take alternatives that have the highest expected utility possible.13 When under uncertainty, dentists either take alternatives with worst possible consequences that are better than or equal to the best possible consequences of the rest or by reducing uncertainty case to the case of risk through subjective probabilities based on expert evaluation. Nevertheless, when making decisions under certainty, dentists’ preferences are simulated by a single attribute or a multi- attributive value function that ranks the set of consequences and their plausible alternatives; in that case, when the decision theory approach is applied in dental care, management is viewed as decision-making. Other management approaches that can also be applied in dental care include empirical approach, mathematical approach, socio-technical systems approach, and the operational approach; the empirical approach to management seeks to advance the knowledge of management by focusing on the past experiences, and drawing lessons from them. The empirical approach to management is also known as case approach because it examines management cases, and it considers management as the observation of a manager in practice. The study of managers in experience is a very essential aspect of this approach because it enables managers to draw basic underlying generalizations that not only serve as teaching experience to practitioners, but also to students; the criteria of success using this approach in management is to duplicate the successful experiences while avoiding the unsuccessful ones. In that instance, the empirical approach to management is an embodiment of the most conventional style of management that dentists can exploit in dental care to enhance service delivery. The mathematical approach, also known as the management science approach, or quantitative measurement approach takes management as a logical entity, which not only expresses actions in mathematical symbol relationships and measurement data, but also provides a means for recognizing and evaluating alternatives to the problem. This approach has led to the establishment of orderly reasoning, thus, yielding exactness in management through the use of various mathematical tools including sampling, linear programming, games theory, and waiting line theory, among others. The socio-technical systems approach focuses on social and technical systems in the daily practice of management concurrently, because the interplay between the two is an integral factor that influences performance improvement.14 In this regard, both the informal interactions of people coupled with technology dynamics co-exist and these two interdependent subsystems must be optimized jointly for success.15 The operational approach attempts to relate the knowledge of management to the functions of management or the management process, thus, it is also referred to as the management process approach; according to this approach, management is a social process that entails a series of actions aimed at accomplishing certain objectives. Evidently, management, both in the dental care and in the general context of organizational management, entails solving a varied spectrum of management issues and complexities that may equally demand for a multi-dimensional tackling; there is no particular management action that can be suitably appropriate in all situations. The most appropriate action is one that fits not only the external environment, but also the internal states and needs, and the contingency or situational approach to management is the sophisticated tactic to comprehend the complexity of management today. In dental care, the situational approach will enable dentists to understand the various interrelationships between variables in a situation and the plausible managerial actions, in addition to, understanding, the managerial actions most appropriate in particular situations in dental care. Nevertheless, dentists can apply any of these approaches in addressing dental care problems and steering their teams into achieving their maximum potential in the provision of dental health services. Undeniably, and evidently so, the management approaches adopted in dental care can be varied greatly and so are the dental care experiences in dental care practice. Overall, management and leadership are distinctive but interrelated and/or complementary aspects in organizations, which entails coping with complexity and coping with change respectively; effective managers and leaders need to adopt the most effective approaches that will ensure success and high performance in terms of quality of service. The various approaches listed and discussed at length in this analysis include the situational approach, the human behaviour approach, the social systems approach, the decision theory approach, and the systems approach. Additionally, other approaches that can be applied by dentists include the empirical approach, the socio-technical systems approach, and the operational approach, together with, the mathematical approach. There is a dire need for dentists to incorporate the most effective leadership and management approaches to enhance dental care, especially because, there exists direct correlation between the quality of service provided and the latter. In that case, dental healthcare practitioners should adopt leadership and management approaches that emphasize the people side of dental care rather than simply the business part of dentistry, and overlooking the staff welfare. In this respect, dentists must continuously engage in management and leadership activities that promote not only the interpersonal interrelationships, but also positive group dynamics because these lead to high job motivation that translates to quality of dental care services. Bibliography Aliev, R, Pedrycz, W, & Huseynov, O. 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