Resilient leadership

Groups related to this event

Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science

Event Date Thursday, 8 December 2016

Title

Resilient leadership: Exploring the most appropriate leadership style for resilient organizations within the health care sector

Speaker

Associate Professor Eric Arne Lofquist, BI Norwegian Business School, Bergen, Norway

Abstract

For the past 10 years, a multi-disciplined, theoretical approach to risk management and safety has emerged to address the issue of improving safety performance in complex, dynamic-adaptive socio-technical systems. The field is called Resilience Engineering. The health care sector has taken the lead in this initiative to adapt the concepts and methods of this field through conferences, books, and practice to improve patient safety performance through an approach called Resilient Health Care. An important area for this study is the role of leadership as a source of resilience and safety performance improvement. One could argue that the health care system represents the worst case scenario for leadership innovations in resilient organizations due to its high level of complexity, continuous change, innovation, and multiple levels of human interaction. However, to date, there is very little prescriptive literature addressing the types of leadership styles most appropriate to guide these resilient organizations.

During this seminar, Eric will present his current study, which attempts to identify resilient qualities at several different levels (society, government, organization, group/team, and individual) as described in the academic literature, and align these with traditional and contemporary organizational leadership theories to propose potential leadership styles that match the needs in resilient organizations, and, in particular, how to improve safety performance in the health care sector. The goal is to produce a psychometric tool based on current leadership knowledge to measure the most appropriate leadership style for leading resilient organizations, and how to improve safety performance.

Speaker profile

Eric is a retired US Naval officer with over 2600 F-14 “Tomcat” hours operating from US aircraft carriers around the world.

Currently an associate professor at Norway’s largest private business school teaching: Health, Safety and Environment; Human Resource Management; Strategic Management; and Creative Leadership in Innovative Organizations.

Eric’s primary research focus is on the effects of organizational change on safety in high-risk environments with a particular interest in the issue of resilience and the leadership’s role in safety performance.

Seminar details

Date: Thursday 8th December, 2016

Time: 12pm – 1pm

Location: Seminar room, Level 1, 75 Talavera Road, Macquarie University

Chairperson: Dr Robyn Clay-Williams, Research Fellow, Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science.

Register for this seminar