DDHA 8113 Week 4 Self-Assessment Analysis Example

A Low Score on Inviting Challenge, Checked Against Three Meetings Colleagues Watched: A Self-Assessment Analysis That Keeps the Episode Where the Instrument Was Wrong

Student Name

Walden University

DDHA 8113: Advanced Concepts in Healthcare Leadership

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

A Low Score on Inviting Challenge, Checked Against Three Meetings Colleagues Watched: A Self-Assessment Analysis That Keeps the Episode Where the Instrument Was Wrong

The Instrument and the Result

As part of this course I completed the self-rating form of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, an instrument that measures transformational, transactional and passive leadership behaviors on a set of subscales (Avolio & Bass, 2004). For eighteen months I have run neurosciences across the three hospitals of Calder Valley Health, a system invented for this course. My highest scores were on the scales describing attention to individual colleagues and on setting clear expectations and rewards. My lowest was intellectual stimulation, the scale that describes how often a leader questions assumptions, seeks different perspectives and encourages others to look at problems in new ways. My score there was well below my other transformational scales and below the norms the manual reports.

An inventory score is a claim about how I behave, made by me. Fleenor et al. (2010), reviewing the research on self-other agreement in leadership ratings, found that self-ratings often differ from others' ratings and that the size and direction of the difference matter for how a leader should interpret them. A self-rating is one source, and a weak one when used alone. This analysis therefore treats my low score as a hypothesis and tests it against three episodes that colleagues observed and could confirm or dispute.

How the Episodes Were Chosen

I chose the three episodes before reviewing them in detail, using one rule: each had to be a meeting in which a decision was open, others were present and someone other than me could describe what happened. I asked one person who attended each meeting to read my account and correct it. I did not choose episodes to confirm or refute the score, and I have reported each one as my colleague corrected it.

Episode One: The Call Rotation Meeting

The first episode was a meeting of eleven neurologists to discuss merging two overnight call rotations into one. I opened by explaining why the merger mattered and then handed the group a draft video consult protocol, asking them to tear it apart. They did. Over forty minutes they removed two steps, added a rule about when an in-person visit is required and rewrote the escalation path. A neurologist who attended confirmed my account and added that I had asked one quiet physician directly for her view, which she said changed the discussion. On the behaviors the intellectual stimulation scale describes, this episode looks strong: the plan's assumptions were questioned, and I invited the questioning.

Episode Two: The Capital Budget Meeting

The second episode was the service line's annual capital planning meeting. Five requests were on the table, and the nurse manager of the neuro ICU questioned whether the top-ranked request, a second portable EEG unit, was the best use of the money, suggesting that an additional nurse educator might reduce more harm. I acknowledged her point and moved to the next item. The finance partner who attended confirmed my account and was blunter than I had been: she said I had decided the ranking before the meeting and had treated the question as an interruption. This episode supports the instrument. A different perspective was offered, and I did not engage with it.

Episode Three: The Scheduling Template

The third episode was a series of clinic meetings about a common new-patient scheduling template. My first approach had been to impose a template, and two clinics quietly rebuilt their old ones. My later approach was to attend each clinic's meetings, ask what made new-patient access hard and accept a neurologist's redesign of my template. The clinic manager who reviewed my account agreed with the sequence but added a point I had left out: in the early meetings I had defended my template's logic at length before asking for views. On her reading, I invited challenge only after my own approach had failed.

Where the Instrument and the Record Agree and Disagree

The second episode agrees with the instrument, and the third partly agrees. In both, my first instinct was to decide and then defend, and different perspectives entered only when someone pushed. The first episode disagrees. In a setting where I lacked expertise, the clinical design of a consult protocol, I invited challenge readily and acted on it. That disagreement is the most useful finding of this analysis, and I have kept it rather than explaining it away.

The pattern that fits all three episodes is narrower than the instrument's scale. I invite challenge when I know the content less well than the people in the room, and I resist it when I believe I know the answer. The questionnaire, which asks how often I behave in certain ways across situations, averages these together and reports a low score. The record suggests the behavior depends on whether I think I am the expert.

What the Finding Means

If the instrument's score were taken at face value, the development response would be general: invite more challenge. The episodes point to something more specific: invite challenge especially on decisions where I am confident, since those are the ones where my colleagues' views currently go unheard. This matters because transformational behaviors such as intellectual stimulation are associated with follower motivation and rated leader effectiveness (Judge & Piccolo, 2004), and the decisions where I am most confident are often the ones that most affect the people who report to me, such as capital ranking and staffing.

Limits of This Analysis

Three episodes are a small sample, and I chose the rule that selected them. Each was checked by one colleague, who may have been reluctant to contradict me more strongly. The instrument has an observer form, completed by others, and the next step should be to ask five colleagues to complete it, which would test my self-rating against others' ratings directly. Until then, the finding is a working account rather than a settled one.

Conclusion

My lowest self-rated scale was intellectual stimulation. Tested against three observed meetings, the score is supported where I believed I knew the answer and contradicted where I did not. The episode that contradicts the instrument is the most informative part of the record, because it shows the behavior is conditional rather than absent. My development work should focus on decisions where I am confident, and the next test should use others' ratings rather than my own.

References

Avolio, B. J., & Bass, B. M. (2004). Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire: Manual and sampler set (3rd ed.). Mind Garden.

Fleenor, J. W., Smither, J. W., Atwater, L. E., Braddy, P. W., & Sturm, R. E. (2010). Self-other rating agreement in leadership: A review. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(6), 1005-1034. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2010.10.006

Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755-768. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.5.755