Hospital and medical practice culture affect how employees act and how well care is given. Studies from hospitals in Spain give useful lessons for healthcare leaders in the United States. One important point is the difference between hierarchical and adhocracy cultures in healthcare settings.
Hospitals and medical offices with a hierarchical culture have strict rules, many levels of authority, and little flexibility. While this method shows clear roles and set procedures, research shows it often leads to less new knowledge, poorer handling of information, and lower hospital efficiency. In these places, innovation and sharing information can be slow because control and following rules are the focus.
On the other hand, organizations with an adhocracy culture have more flexibility, creativity, and independence. Adhocracy allows staff to try new ideas, experiment, and share knowledge openly. Hospitals with this culture report better knowledge creation and use of existing information, which helps them work more efficiently. For healthcare leaders in the U.S., this means they should move away from strict systems toward flexible cultures that support new ideas and ongoing learning.
Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs), a tool in organizational studies, show how culture types, leadership styles, knowledge management, and hospital success connect. This modeling proves that cultures promoting change and new ideas improve healthcare results and how well hospitals run.
How leaders act is very important for how well organizational culture and knowledge management work in healthcare settings. U.S. healthcare is complex with many regulations, new technology, and patient needs. Leaders must be able to handle change and guide their teams well.
Among different leadership styles studied by groups like AdventHealth University and the American Nurses Association, transformational leadership is the most helpful for managing knowledge and improving efficiency.
Transformational leaders inspire change and motivate staff by encouraging creativity, thinking deeply, and sharing responsibility. They do more than just giving orders. They help healthcare teams grow, build respect and trust, and keep communication open. These leaders listen closely, give helpful feedback, welcome new problem-solving methods, and pay attention to team members’ emotional health.
In hospitals with an adhocracy culture, transformational leadership helps create and manage knowledge well, which improves efficiency. This style fits today’s healthcare needs that require quick changes and flexibility because of new technology and rules.
Other leadership styles like transactional, innovative, charismatic, and situational have their use in certain times, such as in crises, following rules, or lifting team spirit. Still, the evidence says transformational leadership is the best for leading digital changes and mixing knowledge, which are important for U.S. healthcare providers.
Healthcare groups depend a lot on gathering, sharing, and using knowledge correctly. Knowledge management means collecting important operational, clinical, and administrative information and making it easy to access for decisions and improvements.
Research from Spain shows that poor knowledge management causes hospitals to work less well. Good knowledge management speeds up problem solving, improves care, and helps different departments work better together. For healthcare leaders in the U.S., this shows that focusing on knowledge management improves care and how organizations perform.
Knowledge management is very important as U.S. healthcare moves towards value-based care and putting patients first. It helps connect clinical data, workflows, rules, and technology. Sharing knowledge between teams and departments leads to better cooperation, fewer mistakes, and support for new ideas.
Transformational leaders play a big role by creating places where staff feel safe to share knowledge and take action. They encourage learning from both success and failure and stress clear communication and responsibility. Together with an adhocracy culture, this type of leadership gives an advantage in handling tough healthcare problems.
One helpful new change in healthcare management is using artificial intelligence (AI) and workflow automation. These tools help handle large amounts of information and repetitive tasks that take up time for medical and administrative workers.
AI automation can improve front-office jobs like patient scheduling, insurance checks, and customer service. For instance, AI phone systems can answer common questions well and quickly. This reduces the work for staff and lets them focus on more important tasks like caring for patients.
Using AI in knowledge management also helps leaders by giving data insights that help with decisions, how to use resources, and improving processes. AI can look at big sets of data to spot patterns, guess patient results, and find where systems are not working well.
In the U.S., healthcare providers must follow many rules and manage complicated billing. Automated workflows help improve accuracy, cut human mistakes, and speed up business steps. Plus, these automation tools can work with electronic health records (EHRs). This helps data move smoothly between clinical and admin areas, while still keeping patient privacy under HIPAA rules.
For AI and automation to work well, leaders must be good at managing digital knowledge—a key part of transformational leadership. They guide change, help staff learn to use new tools, and keep making processes better based on results and needs.
Digital change in healthcare is not just about new technology. It needs leadership that can handle both people and technical improvements. Research by Giovanni Schiuma and others shows that managing knowledge through digital tools and transformational leaders leads to success.
In the U.S., where hospitals use electronic health records, telemedicine, AI diagnostics, and predictive tools, leaders must turn digital possibilities into real progress. This needs a balance of clear vision, understanding of people, and technical skills. The six key skills for transformational leaders are inspiring change, good communication, encouraging organizational flexibility, and keeping digital knowledge active over time.
By focusing on these skills, healthcare leaders can guide their organizations through digital changes better. This leads to better use of resources, more staff involvement, new ways to care for patients, and following rules more easily.
Healthcare management in the United States can improve by using strategies that include flexible cultures, transformational leadership, and good knowledge management. Research shows that hospitals willing to switch from strict hierarchical ways to more flexible adhocracy cultures create better knowledge and work more efficiently.
Leadership styles that support creativity, teamwork, and personal growth—like transformational leadership—work best to meet today’s healthcare demands such as new rules and value-based care. These leaders offer clear vision and relationship skills needed for successful digital changes.
Artificial intelligence and workflow automation help by lowering admin work and improving decisions based on data. When used carefully, these tools improve efficiency and patient care experience.
For healthcare administrators, owners, and IT managers in the U.S., success comes from using these methods and creating work cultures that support ongoing learning and improvement. Using these strategies can improve patient care, lower costs, and make the healthcare system more lasting overall.
The article focuses on the effects of organizational culture and leadership style on knowledge management and hospital efficiency in Spanish hospitals.
The study employed fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) as a tool to evaluate cause-effect relationships among organizational culture, leadership style, knowledge management, and hospital efficiency.
Data were collected through interviews with 21 experts in hospital management conducted between May and September 2023, using either face-to-face or videoconference methods.
FCMs are relational models that represent the opinions and knowledge of experts to infer cause-effect relationships among different concepts within organizations.
The study found that hospitals with a hierarchy culture exhibit diminished levels of knowledge creation, management, and overall hospital efficiency.
Hospitals with an adhocracy culture show improvements in knowledge creation, exploitation, and overall hospital efficiency compared to other organizational cultures.
Transformational leadership achieved the highest levels of knowledge management and hospital efficiency in hospitals with an adhocracy culture.
The study offers insights on practicing knowledge management and improving hospital efficiency through embracing adhocracy culture and transformational leadership.
The primary goal was to identify the relationships between organizational culture, leadership style, knowledge management, and efficiency in hospitals.
Hospital efficiency can be improved by adopting an adhocracy culture combined with transformational leadership to enhance knowledge management practices.
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