What is Fiedler’s Contingency Theory? How did it develop? What are its applications? What are its pros and cons?
Fiedler’s Contingency Theory
In this assignment, you will analyze Fiedler’s Contingency Theory and learn to identify the most effective leadership style to use in different situations.
Using the South University Online Library or the Internet, conduct research to gain a greater understanding of Fiedler’s Contingency Theory.
Read the following scenario and analyze how this situation should be handled.
Scenario
John, a health management student completing an internship at Memorial Hospital, has been appointed chair of a multidisciplinary clinical taskforce by the hospital’s CEO. The taskforce will design a new operational system to reduce the waiting time of patients entering the hospital’s emergency room (ER). Although John had no clinical experience, he had successfully completed a course in operations management prior to beginning his internship and was excited to apply his new knowledge for solving a “real” problem for the hospital.
The hospital CEO told John that when a patient entered the hospital’s ER, it could take up to eight hours from the time the patient was initially triaged by a nurse to the time the patient was either discharged home or admitted as an inpatient by the physician. The CEO said, “Due to quality of patient care issues, this timeframe is unacceptable and the taskforce needs to come up with solutions to this problem. My goal is to reduce the “turnaround” time for the patient from eight hours to two hours.”
Prior to being assigned as the chair of this taskforce, John had informally observed the operations of the hospital’s ER and noted that many of the bottlenecks causing patient care delays were caused by operational issues such as nurses filling out duplicate forms and a lack of communication between the hospital departments (for example, radiology) when the ER physicians ordered tests or were waiting for test results to confirm their diagnoses. These bottlenecks caused a slow turnover of the ER’s examination rooms and unnecessary paperwork resulting in the ineffective use of both the physicians’ and nurses’ time.
In addition to John, the CEO assigned Dr. Smith, the medical director of the hospital’s ER, and Mary, the ER nurse manager, to the taskforce. As chair of the taskforce, John scheduled an initial meeting for 10:00 a.m., the following Monday. John was surprised that both Dr. Smith and Mary arrived twenty minutes late to the meeting saying that this was “taking valuable time away from their normal assignments.” John started the meeting by first introducing himself. Before this meeting, he had no interactions with Dr. Smith and Mary. He then reviewed the current statistics of the average wait time for a patient presenting to the ER and the hospital’s CEO desire to reduce this time. He then opened the meeting for comments and suggestions.
Dr. Smith spoke first, “In my opinion, the current operational systems that we have in place are just fine. We just need more ER physicians and examination rooms so that more patients can be seen.” Dr. Smith told John to recommend that the operational systems were good enough and that the hospital should build a new wing for additional ER exam rooms and hire more physicians.
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