Abstract
The level of leadership skills of healthcare team leaders has long been the subject of interest and many discussions. Several studies have pointed to their inadequacy, which is becoming a serious problem during the global crisis due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There is a direct link between the leadership in the healthcare system and its performance, conditioned by the level of decisions of leaders of medical teams. It is they who determine the performance of healthcare delivery. The study published in this article contains the results from the examination of the dependence between crisis leadership and team performance in healthcare providers. The subject of the research is the impact of cognitive diversity and the quality of crisis-leadership decision-making on the performance of medical teams in the acute crisis phase. The study was conducted on a research sample of 216 healthcare providers after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovakia (April 2020). The respondents to the research sample involved team leaders in healthcare providers, who have been involved in managing the crisis. The study has justified the positive association between crisis leadership and team performance, which is mediated by cognitive diversity, supporting the quality of decision-making in crisis leadership. The results of the research have proven that the performance of the medical team in the acute crisis phase can be positively influenced through qualified decision-making in crisis leadership amplified by the usage of cognitive diversity.
Highlights
The current crisis has emerged unexpectedly and caught the management of healthcare providers largely unprepared
The aim of this study is to examine the content of leadership competence in healthcare providers in crises caused by COVID-19 pandemic and its relation to medical teams’ performance; as well as the mechanism, which mediates their common effect
The aim of this study is to examine the extent of the positive effect of leadership competence on medical teams’ performance caused by cognitive diversity of crises leadership and competent decision-making
Summary
The current crisis has emerged unexpectedly and caught the management of healthcare providers largely unprepared. Leaders of healthcare providers face the urgent challenge of managing the performance of teams of healthcare professionals during a crisis to provide healthcare at its full potential adequate to the time of a pandemic. The influence of leadership quality on employees’ performance has been proven in many studies. Effective leadership has one of the most important impacts on the effective and quality results. Competent leadership has the key role in handling the challenges of pandemics in healthcare providers. The importance of leadership competence of employees with managerial responsibility is currently the subject of discourse, but in practice it is often underestimated. The investment into leadership competence development, which needs to be approached as a holistic concept [6] should be involved in the strategy of healthcare providers with the intention to improve the quality of their services [8]
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