Week 1: Discussion Question – Traditional Leadership vs. Complexity Leadership Contrast the key characteristics of traditional leadership with the key features of Complexity Leadership.  Describe the skill sets needed by nurse leaders in today’s complex healthcare organizations. Expert Answer and Explanation Traditional Leadership vs. Complexity Leadership

Leadership is the ability to influence people to achieve organizational objectives. New leadership styles and theories continue with the ever-changing organizational dynamics. As such, organization leaders should be aware of the new concepts and styles of leadership that they can borrow to make their teams more effective.

Traditional leadership is structured in a way that the relationship between the leader and his/her subordinates is quite formal, based on the authority of the leader. It is more authoritarian, with a top-down approach in most processes, including communication (Belrhiti et al., 2018). Similarly, in traditional leadership, the leader usually gives most of the directives and constantly supervises the team, creating high levels of dependence on the leader. However, the consistently changing organizational dynamics have made operating organizations with traditional leadership challenging.

Instead, a more adaptable leadership style needed to be adopted, leading to what is known as complexity leadership. Complexity leadership is a leadership framework that allows organizations to be more adaptive to change. One of the characteristics of complexity leadership is that it views leadership as a dynamic function that transcends one individual. Instead, it requires collective input to facilitate organizational adaptation bringing the concept of shared leadership (Uhl-Bien et al., 2020).

Rather than depending on the leader to influence action, in complexity leadership, any agent can impact the dynamics of organizational change and innovation. Complexity leadership also relies heavily on collaboration and interactions within the organizational space to respond to different change triggers, thus facilitating adaptability.

For nurse leaders to navigate through today’s complex healthcare organization, they should possess the necessary skill sets. For example, they need to be innovative to implement effective and beneficial changes to adapt to the dynamic organization climate (Pearson, 2020). They also need to have people skills which include motivation, communication, and the ability to influence others towards achieving the vision of the organization. Lastly, they need to be flexible and accommodative to new approaches and organizational change.

References

Belrhiti, Z., Nebot Giralt, A., & Marchal, B. (2018). Complex Leadership in Healthcare: A Scoping Review. International journal of health policy and management, 7(12), 1073–1084. https://doi.org/10.15171/ijhpm.2018.75