Management and Leadership in Higher Education Essay - 1

Management and Leadership in Higher Education - Essay Example provision of services; including nurses, receptionists, technicians, cleaners, and therapists, as well as the dentists themselves; effective managers and leaders in dental care need skills to harness the potential of these professionals.5 Some of these skills include ability to communicate within the care team, with patients, and commissioners, ability to negotiate and resolve conflicts, and knowledge of risk management and its application to clinical governance. Dentists often envision working with people who derive pleasure from assisting one another and caring for their patients but that is never to be as a large proportion of dentists report staff-related issues as the leading stressor in their practices, something that is attributable to the lack of leadership training in dentistry.6 In that respect, lack of leadership training in dentistry makes it impossible for them to lead their teams, ensure a supportive work environment, and dealing with staff issues; a dentist’s le adership approach inevitably influences the dental care communication practices. Consequently, specific leadership behaviours affect the extent to which individuals identify with one another within teams in dental practice, interdependence, and social distance between the dental-care providers; in that case, there is a dire need to incorporate effective management and leadership approaches in dental care as seen in the creation of leadership development programs.7 The first management approach that can be applied in dental care is the situational or contingency approach, which examines managerial actions as reaction to a given set of environmental variables, suggesting that certain management alternatives are most suitable for particular situations.8 Leadership actions in dental care entail... This paper approves that management, both in the dental care and in the general context of organizational management, entails solving a varied spectrum of management issues and complexities that may equally demand for a multi-dimensional tackling; there is no particular management action that can be suitably appropriate in all situations. The most appropriate action is one that fits not only the external environment, but also the internal states and needs, and the contingency or situational approach to management is the sophisticated tactic to comprehend the complexity of management today. This essay makes a conclusion that some approaches that can be applied by dentists include the empirical approach, the socio-technical systems approach, and the operational approach, together with, the mathematical approach. There is a dire need for dentists to incorporate the most effective leadership and management approaches to enhance dental care, especially because, there exists direct correlation between the quality of service provided and the latter. In that case, dental healthcare practitioners should adopt leadership and management approaches that emphasize the people side of dental care rather than simply the business part of dentistry, and overlooking the staff welfare. In this respect, dentists must continuously engage in management and leadership activities that promote not only the interpersonal interrelationships, but also positive group dynamics because these lead to high job motivation that translates to quality of dental care services.