Analyse de la relation d'interdépendance entre qualité du leadership et niveau de résilience organisationnelle en milieu hospitalier

Abstract

Nowadays, the realm of safety management is moving from former reactive to more proactive approaches. Consequently, organizational resilience is increasingly regarded as a relevant way to manage performance and safety in many types of organizations. This concept promotes 4 cornerstones to do so: anticipating, monitoring, responding and learning. However, these competences require a tremendous continual commitment from all staff and stakeholders. The power of influence that some leaders can have on their teams and colleagues might become an explanatory variable of the level of organizational resilience witnessed in all kinds of institutions. This study takes place in healthcare organizations and focuses on two variables: the quality of the leadership expressed by the heads of medical services and the level of organizational resilience preventing these departments from failure. This master’s thesis starts with an overview of published literature on leadership and organizational resilience. The two concepts were first defined and afterwards put into the context of healthcare management. Several tools were then explored and chosen to build a relevant questionnaire in order to lead empirical research in several medical departments. The second part of this thesis is dedicated to the aforementioned comparative study. We led our research by meeting with the heads of 10 different medical departments. These qualitative interviews provided us with valuable information about the way the chief medical officers lead their services and the abilities of those to anticipate and monitor risks, respond to unexpected situations and learn from the past. These empirical results allowed us to identify a resilience profile for each of the visited departments and to assess the quality of the leadership in each of those. Moreover, it enabled us to make clear comparisons between them and to highlight the best practices. Finally, based on our quantitative assessments, we investigated a hypothetical correlation relation between the quality of the leadership and the level of organizational resilience.