The relation between leadership styles and learning environments within an academic medical center

• Main Author: St. John, Cynthia L
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2004
• Subjects: Educational psychology; Leadership; Occupational psychology; Organizational learning
• ISBN: 9780496098941; 0496098942

Background. The United States health care system continues to come under scrutiny due to rising costs, decreased access to care, and the expectation for improvements in the quality of health services. Leadership and organizational learning have both been linked in the literature to continuous improvement and increased quality. The current study proposes that a relation also exists between leadership and organizational learning. Purpose. The potential linkage between leadership and learning is examined within an Academic Medical Center environment. It is hypothesized that the learning environment experienced by an employee will differ according to the leadership style of the employee's immediate supervisor. In addition, it is anticipated that employee perceptions of satisfaction and effectiveness will vary according to the perceived leadership style of the employee's immediate supervisor. Methodology. The study incorporated a cross-sectional survey with stratified random sampling. Two survey instruments were distributed to a sample of 5000 employees, and the demographic characteristics of respondents mirrored the characteristics of the larger sample and population on the variables of interest. Results. Correlational data were examined relative to a set of eight hypotheses reflecting the predicted relations between leadership style and learning environment. While each of these predicted relations were significant at the .001 level, an interesting pattern developed whereas one of the transactional leadership attributes correlated with many of the learning scales more highly than anticipated. The second set of hypotheses, addressing employee perceptions of satisfaction and effectiveness relative to leadership style, was examined using discriminant analysis. One of the five response variables was not effective in predicting group membership, while the other four variables behaved as anticipated. The expected differences between the four leadership styles emerged relative to group means, although two (rather than four) groups were consistently and significantly distinguishable based on the response variables. Conclusions. Support was found for the link between leadership style, perceived learning environment, and perceptions of both satisfaction and effectiveness. Additional attention to the role of transactional contingent reward is warranted, as is continued work on the operationalization of Bass and Avolio's Full Range of Leadership model.