Successful Quality Care Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Successful Quality Care - Essay Example Davies and his co-authors (2000) define organizational culture as an organization’s values, norms and beliefs that shape its behavior. As healthcare organizations go through a key reform of their processes of care delivery, they are now increasingly putting more emphasis on organizational culture and its role in driving innovation, facilitating change as well as bringing a transformation in a healthcare system (Shortell et al., 1995a & Ingersoll et al., 2000). Shortell and his co-authors (1995b) assert that successful quality care implementation initiative calls for a significant devotion to a culture that emphasizes risk-taking autonomy and empowerment. In their studies, Sahney & Warden (1991), Wardhani and co-authors (2009), Dean & Bowen (1994), Metri (2005), Hackman & Wageman (1995) and Powell (1995) have underscored the fact that organizational culture successfully drives quality management. According to Rad (2006), quality management practices’ success as an organizational change largely depends on the organizational culture. Apart from the fact that an organizational culture is of great importance to quality management practices’ success, the central function of an organizational culture that creates and manages it is leadership. Leadership imposes the organizational purpose, beliefs, behaviors and leader’s values on the employees of an organization (Schein, 1985; Shaw, 2002; Senge, 1990; Oqbannan & Hrris, 2000). As much as an organizational culture’s leadership affects the culture, an organizational culture affects its leadership (Bass, p63, 1998). Furthermore, through the influence of daily practices, behaviors, and tasks, the leadership style and values of the leaders shape an organizational culture (Sengupta, 2004 & Hofstede et al., 1990).