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The Practices and Processes of Strategic Leadership

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Shaping High Quality, Affordable and Equitable Healthcare

Part of the book series: Organizational Behaviour in Healthcare ((OBHC))

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Abstract

Achieving strategic change in healthcare is challenging because leaders need to accommodate complex stakeholder demands and reconcile high quality individualised care with population-level cost control. Change efforts are stymied further by bureaucracy and powerful professionals. Increasing demand for healthcare and its costs mean that overcoming these challenges is critical to achieving and sustaining high quality, affordable and equitable healthcare. Given this context, attention to strategic visioning and planning is not sufficient and leaders need to give equal attention to strategy process and implementation to effect change. By drawing on evidence from public healthcare and commercial managerial settings, as well as an illustrative case study, we outline how leaders can overcome these challenges by adopting participative managerial practices that leverage healthcare’s distributed leadership arrangements. Specifically, leaders can effect change by 1) clearly setting contexts for organisational action across top and middle management through role expectations and performance monitoring; and 2) actively managing boundary relations and tensions between different professional and managerial groups to support collaboration. Leaders need to recognise that substantial time needs to be built into implementation for this, including consistent opportunities for meetings between different professional and managerial actors to support shared understandings about situations, roles and activities as they change over time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Warwick Business School, Coventry, UK

    Sarah Woolley

  2. Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Graeme Currie

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  1. Sarah Woolley
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  2. Graeme Currie
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Correspondence to Sarah Woolley .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School for Business and Society, University of York, York, UK

    Nicola Burgess

  2. Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Graeme Currie

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Woolley, S., Currie, G. (2023). The Practices and Processes of Strategic Leadership. In: Burgess, N., Currie, G. (eds) Shaping High Quality, Affordable and Equitable Healthcare. Organizational Behaviour in Healthcare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24212-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24212-0_7

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