Date of Award

4-1992

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Department

Educational Leadership

Abstract

This research examined hospital management leadership style and its effects on hospital labor productivity . Information derived from this research will be useful in the education and training of future health care executives and in the continuing education of those responsible for the day-to-day operations of general acute hospitals.

The hypothesis that was researched in the study was that high consideration/high structure and high consideration/low structure leadership styles would increase productivity in hospital employees who are in the middle stages of organizational development. This was operationally defined in the alternate hypothesis as a relationship between productivity as measured by the Paid Hours Per Adjusted Discharge reporting in the HAS/ Monitrend Report, a research report prepared for hospitals by the American Hospital Association, and the leadership style measured by structure and consideration scores on the Leadership Opinion Questionnaire (Fleishman, 1960).

The population defined for the purpose of this research was the middle managers responsible for the function centers defined by HAS/ Monitrend. The management population was limited in this research to those working for short-term community general hospitals within the Detroit Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area as defined by the United States government. A cluster sampling technique was used to select the individual managers included in the sample. Data were generated by two means. The variable of leadership style was determined by using the Leadership Opinion Questionnaire (Fleishman, 1960). The productivity measure was taken from the HAS/Monitrend Report for the selected hospitals or, for nonreporting institutions, identical data were gathered directly from the hospital using a data gathering sheet. In order to determine if differences found were statistically significant, at test for independent means was used. An alpha of .10 determined the level at which a decision to reject the null hypothesis was made.

The comparisons between the identified leadership styles of the managerial groups showed no statistical differences. Support for the research hypothesis was not borne out by the data collected and analyzed. The research represents another building block in improving hospital performance; and at the same time, it indicates and stresses a need for further research.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Open Access

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