Organizational culture: the silent political force

Suggested methods to improve physician-hospital relationships in Canada

This article focuses on the suggested methods to improve the quality of Physician-Hospital Relations (PHRs) in the Canadian healthcare system based on the opinions and perspectives of healthcare leaders across all provinces and territories who participated in the Canadian National Study of Interprofessional Relationships between Physicians and Hospital Administrators (CANSIRPH). Improving PHRs equals higher patient care quality, error reduction, well-managed budgets, and professional satisfaction of clinical and non-clinical leaders.

A preceptor café: serving up universal values for preceptors

How do you affirm meaning and articulate values that will serve as the bedrock of a preceptor program? The Medical Specialty Preceptor Committee in a large hospital system planned a series of preceptor forums for 88 medical specialty preceptors. The goals were to renew commitment, refresh vision, and develop strategies for successfully orienting new hires. This study began by examining the work of JoEllen Koerner in her book Healing Presence: The Essence of Nursing. The universal values in her model involve acknowledging and addressing three basic levels: safety needs, relationship needs, and self-esteem needs, encompassing the individual's connection to the external world. The middle level is labeled transformation and goes beyond the first three levels to how the individual expresses the authentic self within the working world. The higher levels involve intuition, intention, and self-actualization and focus on the inner world of the individual. The needs of orientees could be met in all of these dimensions, based on existing structure and process in the organization. Relationship-based care as our nursing model guides holistic care. Our rich institutional heritage promotes values-based teamwork. Our goal was to articulate these values and hold discussions among preceptors about how these values could be expressed and developed in orientees. These café conversations were held as spring forum sessions. This article highlights essential ideas at the core of this preceptor activity.

Toward a Theory of Personal Politics

The ability to effectively navigate organizational politics to achieve one’s goals has long been recognized as necessary for individuals to experience success within their organizations. Many studies have linked the effective use of political behaviors to increased individual performance. As such, many scholars within HRD and other disciplines have created practitioner techniques and models to guide individuals in their pursuit of personal success within an organization. Although these tools are useful, there is no common theoretical framework that can ground these practices into theory and explain why some individuals can be successful in the pursuit of personal goals within the organization whereas others are not. This article introduces a cross-disciplinary framework for a theory of personal politics (TPP). TPP contends that individuals achieve their goals within an organization because they understand how the forces of multiple actors on multiple levels of analysis shape (drive or constrain) actor interactions within varying contexts. The creation of this framework and the ongoing development of the theory are based on the theory of international politics (TIP) authored by Kenneth Waltz, an international relations (IR) theorist for nearly 60 years.