Leader of Change in Healthcare Organizations

Author(s): Fabio Mozzarelli*

The organizational innovations to which the healthcare companies are called to perform require professionals who have a managerial role to take care of introducing new organizational solutions but also to take on the relational and motivational environment with the professionals who will undergo organizational change. These professionals, change agents, must possess leadership and management traits. Organizational change requires the ability of those who implement it to transform their behavior from a previous method to a new practice and then make it stable after the requested change. The aforementioned passage often creates resistance that the leadership and management are called upon to manage. These hostilities are all the more structured in public health services where the high complexity, the huge size of the organizations and the regulations harden the system that tends to maintain the status quo even if recognized as dysfunctional and unproductive. In this context, the professional change agent must possess both managerial characteristics that are required to manage processes to govern a complex system of people and technologies. It must also put in place elements of leadership such as the management of relations between people that constitute the processes of influence, indoctrination and motivation that aim to obtain expected behaviors reducing the use of sanctioning power. Last but not least, the leader who deals with change must take into account the organizational culture which is the set of practices, relations, formalized rules and even more, those not written which constitute the identity of a group. The leader who drives organizational change must enjoy wide autonomy, must possess a clear mandate from the strategic management, must carefully analyze the context variables in order to identify and move positive energies, and limit the resistances by managing the negativity

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