A glance at the competing values framework of Quinn and the Miles & Snow strategic models: Case studies in health organizations

Abstract

The present research seeks to describe and understand how strategy influences leadership and how this in turn interacts in the process of innovation and change in health organizations. This is an exploratory and descriptive study that involved five health organizations: four Portuguese and one Spanish. We used a mixed approach of research (qualitative and quantitative), which enabled us to understand, through case study, how strategy and leadership were articulated with innovation in these five health organizations. Despite their complexity and specificity, both the model of Miles & Snow (organizational strategy) and the model of the Competing Values Framework of Quinn (organizational culture and leadership), suitably adapted, have proven heuristic power and are able to be applied to healthcare organizations. Public and private healthcare organizations, as well as public-private partnerships, can be tracked and monitored in their processes of innovation and change in order to understand its kind of culture, leadership or organizational strategy adopted. Health organizations coexist in a continuum, where the environment (internal and external) and time are key factors which determine the strategy to be adopted. Here too depending on the dynamic and complex reality where the organization moves, there are no pure types. There is indeed a great organizational plasticity and flexibility. Leaders usually carry the formal authority by circular normative. They are not pairs (or primi inter pares). Instead they are, sometimes, in a position of superiority, when the best thing is partnership, collaboration, cooperation, building consensus and cooperation with all stakeholders, in order that they are the real protagonists and facilitators of change and innovation. © 2012 Escola Nacional de Sade Pblica. Publicado por Elsevier.