Review your required reading, especially Goodsons (2017) Exercise 35 (attached), and the APA publication manual (2019) (Not attached it’s online), and think about your experiences in w

Healthcare Leaders in COVID-19 and Relationships with Trust, Teamwork, and adaptability

Research Critique – RES 7011

May 3, 2022

Healthcare Leaders in COVID-19 and Relationships (Trust, Teamwork, and adaptability) -Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world at the most unexpected moment, and it directly or indirectly impacted the livelihood of all people across the globe. Many programs were abruptly disrupted, and people were forced to adjust to different styles of living (Howe et al., 2021). Likewise, the organizations were not spared. The virus forced many organizations to change their initial strategies and come up with new measures to guarantee their survival in the business world. The virus increased pressure in all industries which created the need for stakeholders to join forces and synergize towards combating the pandemic and recovering. The leaders in different organizations had to create stronger relations with their employees to handle the impacts of the crisis and enhance productivity in the midst of the pandemic. Several other aspects such as trust, teamwork, and adaptability had to be put into consideration to guarantee sustainability and survival for the different stakeholders. The healthcare industry has been extremely affected by the pandemic despite its preparation (Lukasik & Porebska, 2022). By scrutinizing the impacts of COVID 19 on healthcare and other industries, the paper argues how the incorporation of trust, teamwork, and adaptability on employer-employee relationships enhanced the overall performance and sustainability of different stakeholders and organizations during the global pandemic.

The three aspects are key to enhancing employer-employee relations. Trust in the workplace implies a situation whereby employees experience a culture of honesty, mutual respect, and psychological safety (Goh et a., 2013). Teamwork is the combined effort of a group to achieve a common objective in the workplace. On the other hand, adaptability entails the ability to be flexible and able to change to achieve maximum success (Pulakos et al., 2017). COVID 19 impacted negatively various industries such as manufacturing, technology, sports, travel, and tourism among others. The long term sustainability of any organization is dependent on many factors and chief of those will be the quality and ability of the leader of such organization. Since leader who are authentic have the unique ability to engage and positively affect organization’s outcomes by influencing followers. This positive influence led to a dependency and relationship that is essential for organization’s trust and teamwork that helps organization to navigate and adapt during high pressured period like COVID-19 (Chen & Sriphon 2021). In the context of this paper who do we consider to be a good leader? These are leaders who can positively impact organization productively and positively towards achieving their goals by influencing employee to engage impact the set organization goals (Fernandez & Shaw, 2020).

The goal of this paper is to argue that the COVID-19 pandemic emphasized the need for good leadership that engenders trust, collaborative teamwork, and adaptability between the healthcare leaders and employees as vital to their success.

COVID-19 disrupted many programs in individual lives and in different organizational setups. For instance, companies had to retrench several workers and retained a few of them in order to cut down on costs of operations and lower the chances of getting into losses. Due to the pandemic, most organizational operations are being carried out from home. According to Parker et al. (2020), roughly 6 out of 10 workers who are about 59% of employees in the United States admit to working from home. This literary meant that much more productivity was expected from the remaining employees. In the medical sector, healthcare leaders and other stakeholders such as the nurses would be forced to increase the rate at which they worked in order to provide proper medical care to the number of COVID 19 patients which was increasing day by day (Michalec & Lamb, 2020). This was the same case in almost all the departments. The researchers and scientists were forced to spend sleepless days and nights in the labs in order to come up with the vaccine for COVID 19 and this was a hard task considering the fact that the virus was mutating continuously. More pressure was also on the different governments as they tried to come up with solutions for the citizens. Different government bodies were working tirelessly to link with other stakeholders and experts so as to gather the right information and make informed and accurate decisions in efforts to combat the menace. There was a lot of work pressure which resulted in a lot of work-related stress and depression. Work pressure also resulted in reduced productivity and difficulty in concentrating hence there was a need to create an environment of trust and emotional dependency to relieve all pressure.

Review of the Literature

Trust and Emotional Dependency Relieve Work Pressure

Trust and emotional dependency in the workplace are key to enhancing the performance of different members and teams within an organization. For members to emotionally depend on each other, there ought to be an environment of trust. Trust in the workplace enables members to freely communicate their vulnerabilities and issues to other workers and even the leaders which help create a synergistic culture that improves overall performance (Joniaková et al., 2021). When the workers communicate their struggles with colleagues, they are able to offload some emotional burdens and relieve their pressure. For trust to be cultivated, leaders have to employ a number of strategies such as creating a diverse and inclusive culture whereby all workers or members are free to participate and contribute towards achieving a common goal. Trust and emotional dependence helped relieve stress during the COVID 19 pandemic in various ways. Leaders also became willing to listen more to different members of the groups. When workers such as nurses are given the chance to make contributions, they actually realize that they are not the only ones responsible for fighting the disease (Ametz et al., 2021). The feeling that all members are working towards achieving a common goal reduces pressure and enhances performance. In an environment of trust, employees are able to be given genuine feedback by their leaders. For instance, when nurses were given genuine feedback on their areas of work, they clearly understood their strengths and weaknesses (Arnetz et al., 20210. They worked on their weaknesses and improved their performance which relieved their work-related pressures. Appreciation of workers’ efforts such as the nurses by their leaders made them feel recognized and have a sense of belonging which helped relieve work-related pressure and enhanced productivity (Joniaková et al., 2021).

Leadership Can Facilitates Performance with Engagement, Trust

Leadership that creates trust and employee engagement using a team-based conceptualization may have better outcomes in these trying times for healthcare workers (Goh., et al., 2013). It is important that leaders create trust in employees because high levels of trust brought about increased productivity and facilitated relationships, which ultimately led to increased team performance (Baka et al., 2021). Leadership is all about intentional modeling of the employees and influencing positive emotions which enable them to excel in their work. Positive relationships are key in developing an environment of trust among all stakeholders involved. A good relationship between managers and employees would enhance productivity. A positive relationship plays a critical role in ensuring the mental well-being of an individual (Fernandez & Shaw, 2020). Teamwork encouraged and strengthened individuals to combat the rapidly spreading infection despite the overlying burden. Via interactions, people would learn different ways of coping and managing stress which could have led to depression. On the other hand, a communal relationship entails a worker assuming responsibility for the well-being of their fellow colleagues. A communal relationship is encouraged by good leadership (Traylor et al., 2021). It implies that one individual is willing to bear the cost of another individual. A communal relationship ensures the bond between two individuals is strengthened. For example, after the emergence of COVID-19, There were frequent changes in policies as the scientific community tried to adapt to a quickly changing pandemic. Adaptability was integral to everyday workplace and life experience. A level of competence is achieved thereby increasing the likelihood of achieving the best outcomes in terms of performance (Goh et al., 2013). During the period of COVID-19, coordination and teamwork were fostered between health workers and the government. Consequently, trust was built since the public could trust the government that it had the ability to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Collectively, both positive and mutual relationships enhanced the performance of healthcare as well as improved patient outcomes. Although COVID-19 brought many disadvantages, it strengthened a positive relationship between employers and employees. During times of COVID-19, social interactions between managers and employees were significantly reduced (Catalyst, 2020). People could work from home. Working from home had a negative impact at first. It was a new normal that forced people to adopt new measures for living. After adapting to the new normal, managers and employees would safely work at home. Working at home enhanced trust among leaders and employees since services were perfectly delivered even without supervision. A positive relationship is based on trust and commitment. The role of leaders was well understood because managers were expected to maintain the economic sustainability of the company regardless of social interactions (Yücel, 2021). Not all the managers maintained the sustainability of their organizations but only those who embraced positive relationships maintained the fruitful performances. A good positive relationship facilitates mutual relationships hence increasing the performance of organizations as it fosters a friendly working environment. Health workers across all health settings were extremely committed to stopping further infections (Kniffin et al., 2021). Healthcare scientists firstly carried out the research to establish the causal agent of the unknown killer disease. This alarmed the public and provided regulations and guidelines for curbing the pandemic. Health practitioners were forefront in providing education on measures to be put into account in a bid to mitigate the disease. This portrays a great commitment to saving the lives of individuals and can be symbolized by a positive attitude towards leadership.

When COVID-19 increased, Directly Proportional to Leadership Engagement

In healthcare settings, health workers such as nurses had to adjust in order to attend to the increasing number of patients (Łukasik and Porębska, 2022). Containing COVID-19 pandemic was paramount to the survival of the world and increase workers demand led to increased leadership engagement. Managing COVID-19 is observed to be directly proportional to the leadership engagement (Joniaková et al., 2021). In other words, if there is laxity among leaders, there is a likelihood of higher infections. If there is leadership teamwork, it becomes possible for a country to mitigate the spread of the virus. Effective management should always be characterized by the ability to adapt and embrace any changes that arise (Schraff, 2021). COVID-19 came unexpectedly and turned out to be a crisis. In such a crisis, effective leadership engagement is absolutely necessary for any organization and its people. It is thereby the responsibility of any leader to encourage their followers by directing them on what to do. After the emergence of the pandemic, most governments came together to provide a reliable solution to their citizens. In the USA, the government in conjunction with other non-governmental organizations took the liability of protecting people by instilling possible control measures that eventually were deemed as a “success”. Similarly, if the government did not get concerned about the devastating pandemic, it would spread faster hence causing more deaths than expected. From this perspective, leaders and company managers should embrace team cohesion as well as innovative strategies especially when there is an occurrence of a pandemic (Michalec & Lamb, 2020).

Relationship leads to quality leadership that helps during high-pressure moments

COVID 19 had many negative implications for humans such as a dramatic and extreme loss of human life. When pandemics happen, they affect all aspects of life and the impacts are felt emotionally, physically, psychologically, and even mentally. Conditions worsened in all industries and even the world’s best economies were shaken (Joniaková et al., 2021). This led to the loss of many jobs and many families became devastated not having any clue about what to do (Narayanamurthy & Tortorella, 2021). There was a drastic change in people’s standards of living as many were forced to adapt to lower standards of living while others were forced to be dependent on the governments and the help of other well-wishers for donations since they were not able to feed themselves and their families. Schools were closed as a means to prevent the spread of the disease through contact, but this had negative emotional implications on the emotional well-being of most students. Moreover, parents were in extreme anxiety as there was so much uncertainty about how long the disease was going to last. There were also a lot of social stigmas against victims of COVID-19 and also their family members in general. This left the victims and their families hurting even more. All these negative implications led to social distress and high-pressure moments and there was more massive social unrest than ever before.

The disease hit almost all stakeholders in the economy. For people to win and overcome such a pandemic, there should be extreme synergy among all relevant bodies and individuals. For instance, healthcare workers had to coordinate efforts in order to attend to the rising cases of patients. Relationships between the healthcare leaders and the other stakeholders in all departments have to be emphasized much since a failure to do so would lead to more casualties. Nurses have to work extra hard than normal and had to adjust to different programs such as being assigned duty in a very different geographical location. Leaders from different hospitals have to coordinate and keep the government updated with the right statistics so as to enable them to make informed decisions. For example, more hospital beds were delivered to the areas where the disease had spread rampantly. Lastly, concrete relations were created among different scientific research bodies especially those that were concerned with the manufacturing of vaccines (Baka, Ścigała & Grala, 2021). They had to brainstorm and come up with accurate measures and strategies considering that the virus kept on mutating from time to time.

Good relationships also enhance quality leadership in other fields apart from the medical sector. There should be a lot of synergy between employers and employees in order to make working from home a success (Yang et al.,2020). During the COVID 19 pandemic, this helped save the jobs of many employees who would be otherwise laid off and be left hopeless with no means to survive. Moreover, the leadership created from the employer-employee relationships also guaranteed the success and survival of many organizations which helped release the pressure from all the stakeholders involved (Chen & Sriphon, 2021). Likewise, the technological sector synergized with the businesses to ensure smooth operations and easier connections between the employers and employees. Various technological aspects such as video conferencing helped in enhancing communications between employers and employees and made the delegation of tasks become easy, more fun, and smooth. Additionally, different organizations and even individual philanthropists joined hands to help fund the marginalized individuals and families. Some people in the society were very disadvantaged by the disease than others hence they required help desperately. If it were not for the donations made by different stakeholders, more people would suffer and even starve to death which would create more social pressure and unrest.

In conclusion, it is important to understand that teamwork is the best option for overcoming and coping with pandemics. It is only coordination that facilitated the achievement of the best outcome. It is the role of leaders and managers to incorporate positive leadership in order to guide other people in making appropriate decisions, especially during a difficult time. Trust should be also embraced at all levels to promote reliability among employees and managers. People are encouraged to trust the system in decision-making when there is an occurrence of a pandemic. If trust is enhanced between the leaders and the public, there are high chances of maintaining sustainability despite the weight of the burden (Baka et al., 2021 and Chen & Sriphon, 2021). Adaptability is a concept that should be well grasped by all the individuals within the society. Every individual must be always ready for change since the future is unpredictable. Understanding adaptable measures will in turn aid both managers and employees to overcome difficult times (Pulakos et al., 2017).

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