Leaderships and Ethics in healthcare (hospital mainly) Essay

Leaderships and Ethics in healthcare (hospital mainly) - Essay Example The ethical dilemmas in healthcare environments are further aggravated by factors like inadequate number of physicians to attend to patients, shortage of support staff, consolidation of healthcare organizations, downsizing and cost-cutting measures, and above all ineffective leadership. (Murray, 2010) The response of an individual to such ethical crisis is determined by their prior experiences with unethical behaviour, their individual personality traits, their ethical values and their knowledge of ethical principles (Clancy, 2003). Very few articles in today’s healthcare literature have addressed the issue of ethical leadership in the healthcare industry. This essay looks forward to providing a valuable insight into the twin concepts of leadership and ethics, enumerating the various approaches to ethical leadership and enlisting the criteria for assessing leader, with reference to the healthcare industry. Leadership is defined as the ability to influence a group towards the achievement of goals.The trends in leadership studies reveal a plethora of the different aspects of leadership and yet there is no universally accepted definition or model of a leader. The first dominant framework on leadership was the Trait Theory or the â€Å"Great Men† Theory which was proposed in the early twentieth century. The theory considers personality, social, physical or intellectual traits to differentiate leaders from non-leaders. This theory ascribes conventional qualities like ambition and energy, honesty and integrity, self-confidence, intelligence and knowledge to leaders and holds that leaders are born, not made. Mid-twentieth century saw the rise of the Behaviourist school of leadership which emphasized on the actions and dominant behaviour of the leaders and highlighted the leaders’ behaviour on the job, use of authority and task-relationship orientation. Later, scholars such as F red Fiedler realised that a leader must match his/her situation and leadership style should