Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, August, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 133-140)

Thesis (M.B.A. (Rhodes Investec Business School)) - Rhodes University, 2007. / A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Administration.

<p> This qualitative, bounded, single case study centered on the process of building and leading the top management team during a presidential transition at a private, not-for-profit, coeducational, faith-based university in the United States. Specifically, the research concentrated on the dynamics of rebuilding a leadership team in a turbulent environment under a new president. </p><p> The primary source of data was semi-structured, in-person interviews with the new president and nine out of 10 top management team members. Detailed interviews provided comprehensive and extraordinary first-hand access to the team construction and leadership process. Other data sources, including relevant artifacts, documents, and press releases, were collected and analyzed to provide important details about the case context. </p><p> Major findings and conclusions are discussed in relation to the literature on leadership and top management teams. Five conclusions provide practical recommendations from the president&rsquo;s vantage point: (1) the president recognized the necessity of restructuring her team in order to meet the board&rsquo;s mandate; (2) in a highly turbulent institutional environment, the president constructed a diverse executive-level team with very limited resources; (3) the president&rsquo;s communication and leadership style reflected a high degree of emotional intelligence that contributed to her overall effectiveness; (4) the president provided structure and a defined role, which enabled and guided the team to more effectively implement its mission; and (5) the president&rsquo;s coaching assisted in (a) managing conflict, (b) developing trust, and (c) enhancing the team&rsquo;s learning. </p><p> Recommendations for future research and implications for both theory and practice are presented to conclude the study. Senior leadership teams are essential to the success of their organizations. Therefore, it is important that those charged with executive leadership give priority to the important task of systematically assessing and building the leadership team, particularly under new leadership. In this study, the new president completely overhauled the team, and her personal leadership style, which involved a high level of emotional intelligence along with personal coaching of the team, attracted others to join. The use of coaching in senior leadership teams in higher education seems to be emerging as a new area for theory development. </p><p>

The pace and intensity of educational reform over the past quarter of a century has seen wholesale changes to the nature and organisation of schooling and mounting demands placed on school leaders (Chapman and Gunter, 2009) with increasingly burdensome workloads blamed for problems relating to the recruitment and retention of headteachers (Whitaker, 2003). Since 2002, and largely in response to these concerns, successive governments have invested in national programmes to strengthen the potential of a previously fragmented section of the school workforce whose skills and knowledge are particularly well-placed to improve capacity and reduce the workload of headteachers in the areas of administration and finance: the School Business Manager (SBM). A decade on there is thought to be approximately 13,000 SBM posts across the country (Summerson, 2009) forming an integral part of the school workforce. So how has the role developed in that time? What influence are SBMs having in the schools in which they operate? What kind of work does the SBM role encompass in a modern day educational setting? This thesis focuses on the emergence of SBMs in English schools, specifically drawing upon the composition of the role; the areas of school in which they are impacting and; the facilitators and barriers to the development of successful models of school business management. The research strategy employs a multi-perspective, case study design to explore the sphere of activity of the SBM in a range of schools of different types and phases. A mixed-methods approach was adopted to collect documentary, survey and interview evidence from a number of sources and school stakeholders. The findings identify significant diversity in terms of the responsibilities undertaken by SBMs, the areas of educational provision the role can incorporate and the type of impact they are able to make within, between and beyond schools. The evidence also highlights the varying degrees of leadership and management being exercised by SBMs in different settings while underlining the cultural and contextual factors that can facilitate and inhibit the success of school business management models. What emerges is a role that can be of meaningful, tangible and sustainable benefit to schools but one that is still to be fully accepted, appreciated and understood in some quarters of the school system. To conclude, a heuristic of different approaches to school business management is presented to provide a speculative consideration of some of the key characteristics of school business management models across different school types. This working model is put forward as a means of stimulating further reflection on the implications of the findings.

Research into choosing individuals to fill positions at or near board level in organisations is scarce; however we know that interviewing is the dominant selection practice. The research into selection interviewing at junior and middle levels is extensive. Overwhelmingly it takes the form of scientific (typically psychological) studies of independent, interacting individuals understood in either rational agent or stimulus-response modes. This research narrates the author’s involvement as an expert adviser to the board of a UK non-profit in the selection of their chief executive. The narrative material is interrogated using the concepts of habitus and practice as developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. This work builds on explorations of power, skill and intuition which use further narratives of the author’s experience as an interviewer and a leader, and also a participant in the management doctorate programme at the University of Hertfordshire. Previously the author worked for eighteen years in executive search. The author argues that both the practice of senior selection interviewing and its theorisation are damaged by too narrowly scientific a discourse which neglects substantial strands of relevant scholarship (for example within broader management studies, sociology, critical theory and philosophy). Behavioural competencies and transferable skills – bedrock concepts in contemporary human resource ‘best practice’, including selection – are called into question. The author experiences the practice of senior selection interviewing as stuck, caught between cynical and scientific interpretations of itself (that is, self-interested power play and disinterested measurement). Neither perspective yields a productive dialectic. The ideas of habitus and practice open a different understanding which does not simply reject the preceding perspectives but attempts to advance beyond them.

A cornerstone of the following thesis is conviction, that education is a core activity of every school and its headteacher is a main character in reaching quality of education. Leadership and management must go hand in hand, but they are not the same. In his analysis author uses many foreign researches to introduce leadership in the school enviroment. A theory of management by competencies is an introduction for the following comparison of the headteachers education in selected countries. Author keeps on mind an education policy of the OECD. A quantitative research among 112 headteachers is a synthesis of the previous qualitative analysis. A statistic method of generalized linear models (GLM) was used for analysis of the data. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

The Healthcare Quality Strategy for NHS Scotland, relates its overall vision of healthcare quality to six dimensions of care as: Safe, Efficient, Effective, Equitable, Timely and Patient Centred. Patient Centred Care also underpins many subsequent policies such as the management of Long Term Conditions (Scottish Government, 2008) and the Chief Medical Officers Realistic Medicine report (Barlow, et al., 2015) Leadership styles and associated policies and procedures are often assumed to inhibit or encourage the delivery of quality Patient Centred Care and the NHS invests millions of pounds per year in Leadership training. At a clinical team and management level there are behaviours and initiatives that can arguably have positive and negative impacts on the ability of individual practitioners to provide quality Patient Centred Care. However there have been no attempts to empirically test the association between (good) Leadership and quality Patient Centred Care. Without any evidence of such a relationship, NHS investment of substantial resources may be misguided. Additionally, much of the focus of research in both Leadership and Patient Centred Care has focused on medical practitioners and nurses. There is little research that focuses on the impact of allied health professionals' (a term describing 12 differing health care professional groups representing over 130,000 clinicians throughout the United Kingdom) practice on the quality of person centred care and how this is affected by Leadership structures and styles. This study aimed to explore whether there is a direct or indirect link between (transformational) Leadership and achieving the delivery of high quality Patient Centred Care (PCC) in allied health professional (AHP) practice. Aim The aim of this thesis was to explore whether it was possible to empirically demonstrate a relationship between Leadership (good or bad) and Patient Centred Care, and to do this in relation to Allied Health Professional practice. Research questions I. Is there a relationship between Transformational Leadership and Patient Centred Care in AHP practice? II. How do AHP’s conceptualise Leadership and its impact on their ability to deliver PCC? III. Do local contexts influence the ability of leaders to support Patient Centred Care? Study one Study one was designed to answer research question one: exploring the relationship between transformational Leadership and Patient Centred Care using survey design. Two groups of Allied Health Professionals were selected to take part in the study: Podiatrists and Dieticians. Clinical team leaders from across 12 Podiatry teams and 12 Dietetic teams completed a survey composed of measures of transformational Leadership and self-monitoring. Clinicians from these teams were also be asked to complete questionnaires on their perception of their clinical leaders’ transformational Leadership skills. This allowed comparison of self-assessed Leadership and team assessed Leadership. Clinicians were also asked to collect patient experience measures from 30 of their patients. Study Two Study Two was designed to answer research questions 2 and 3: how do AHPs conceptualise Leadership and how do they view the link between Leadership and their ability to deliver Patient Centred Care; and how might local context impact on professional Leadership and therefore its potential to enable or inhibit Patient Centred Care. In depth interviews were conducted with clinicians and clinical team leaders to explore the barriers and facilitators to effective Leadership, teamwork and the provision of quality care. Interviews were conducted with 21 Podiatrists and 12 Dieticians and analysed using a framework analysis approach. Results I. Is there a relationship between Patient Centred Care and transformational Leadership in AHP practice? The theory that there is a link between transformational Leadership and Patient Centred Care was confirmed. A significant relationship was discovered for the dietetics group linking Transformational Leadership with patient centred quality of care measures. There was also a relationship in the podiatry group that was suggestive of a relationship. II. How do AHP’s conceptualise Leadership and its impact on their ability to deliver PCC? AHP’s in both groups had broadly similar conceptualisations of Leadership and both groups played down the role of Leadership in the delivery of Patient Centred Care. A far more salient factor in achieving the delivery of high quality Patient Centred Care for the AHP’s interviewed was professional autonomy. III. Do local contexts influence the ability of leaders to support Patient Centred Care? A number of contextual issues related to both Patient Centred Care and Leadership were identified from the qualitative analysis. These were centred on systemic factors, relating to management and bureaucracy, and individual factors, such as relationships within teams. In Podiatry a major shift in the context of care was ongoing during the study, namely a greater emphasis on encouraging patients to self-care. This affected the relationships between patients and Podiatrists, and Podiatrists and managers, in a way that Podiatrists felt it negatively impacted on their ability to provide quality Patient Centred Care. Conclusion A weak relationship was observed between Transformational Leadership styles and the delivery of Patient Centred Care in two Allied Health Professional groups. Professional autonomy was identified as being more likely to facilitate delivery of person centred care. Organisational issues and intervening policy directives can impact on the delivery of Patient Centred Care, regardless of Leadership. Recommendations Further work exploring the link between Leadership and Patient Centred Care is required. The concept of professional autonomy should be fostered within Leadership programs to enhance delivery of Patient Centred Care. The impact of individual policies, such as moves towards more self-care, on quality criteria need to be more fully considered. Whilst such policies may make care more efficient, there may be negative consequences for other quality care criteria, such as Patient Centred Care.

The focal point of this thesis is an interest in the phenomena of regenerative work, which is a work that has the potential of recreating and developing human resources and energy. The aim is to make a contribution, by presenting a supplementary perspective, to this area of research by considering regenerative work through a process perspective where the centre of interest is transferred from being a question of what to a question of how? The guiding research question is as follows: How could the organizing processes of regenerative work be understood? - more specifically - through an interactive approach the purpose is to describe, analyze and understand those everyday processes that have implications for regenerative work. This general inquiry took place at a number of wards/departments at a hospital in southern Sweden. Above all, the empirical focus concentrated on two specific occurrences: (1) an implementation of a new work model at the various wards/departments and (2) the function of the ward managers and their work situation. Empirical material was collected in collaboration with assistant nurses, registered nurses and ward managers through forum dialogues, interviews and observations. Narratives as formation of knowledge are a significant tool that constitutes an important foundation of this thesis. The chain of events and actions of complex processes are thus interpreted and understood by means of using narratives as a research device. The narrative form was also a source of inspiration for a large portion of the results presentation. The comprehension of the construction of experiences that may be related to regenerative work must be interpreted and understood beyond an individualistic perspective. Overconfidence in rules and routines, and a predetermined execution of the work proved also to be problematic in a complex and symbolically charged reality. Consequently, regenerative work must be understood in the light of a reality/world that consists of regularities and irregularities as well as predictability and unpredictability. It is in the complexity of such worlds, actors are required to interpret what their work/assignment is about and to carry it out satisfactory and to the best of their ability. Hence, two crucial questions are derived: How is the work/assignment interpreted? Are their prerequisites in the organization enabling and supporting good performances? In conclusion, these two questions are interconnected and discussed further in view of local basic conditions for conversation and action as well as leadership in terms of organizing for sensemaking. / QC20100701

The focal point of this thesis is an interest in the phenomena of regenerative work, which is a work that has the potential of recreating and developing human resources and energy. The aim is to make a contribution, by presenting a supplementary perspective, to this area of research by considering regenerative work through a process perspective where the centre of interest is transferred from being a question of what to a question of how? The guiding research question is as follows: How could the organizing processes of regenerative work be understood? - more specifically - through an interactive approach the purpose is to describe, analyze and understand those everyday processes that have implications for regenerative work. This general inquiry took place at a number of wards/departments at a hospital in southern Sweden. Above all, the empirical focus concentrated on two specific occurrences: (1) an implementation of a new work model at the various wards/departments and (2) the function of the ward managers and their work situation. Empirical material was collected in collaboration with assistant nurses, registered nurses and ward managers through forum dialogues, interviews and observations. Narratives as formation of knowledge are a significant tool that constitutes an important foundation of this thesis. The chain of events and actions of complex processes are thus interpreted and understood by means of using narratives as a research device. The narrative form was also a source of inspiration for a large portion of the results presentation. The comprehension of the construction of experiences that may be related to regenerative work must be interpreted and understood beyond an individualistic perspective. Overconfidence in rules and routines, and a predetermined execution of the work proved also to be problematic in a complex and symbolically charged reality. Consequently, regenerative work must be understood in the light of a reality/world that consists of regularities and irregularities as well as predictability and unpredictability. It is in the complexity of such worlds, actors are required to interpret what their work/assignment is about and to carry it out satisfactory and to the best of their ability. Hence, two crucial questions are derived: How is the work/assignment interpreted? Are their prerequisites in the organization enabling and supporting good performances? In conclusion, these two questions are interconnected and discussed further in view of local basic conditions for conversation and action as well as leadership in terms of organizing for sensemaking.

Diss. Uppsala : Univ., 2004.