Combating infections at Maine Medical Center: Insights into complexity-informed leadership from positive deviance

Abstract

A case study of how the organizational change process known as Positive Deviance was used to fight healthcare-associated infections at Maine Medical Center highlights the human and social aspects of leadership in a complex adaptive system. It illustrates that leadership can shape selforganization in a manner that facilitates creative, productive, desirable outcomes. We found influential roles of anxiety, attachment, and relationships in facilitating organizational leadership. We describe how the process of leadership permeated the Medical Center's hierarchies and networks and reflected emergent power dynamics, which included contemporizing some aspects of traditional managerial authority. The study contributes to the management literature by clarifying the dynamics and qualities associated with change in complex human systems and illuminating what constitutes complexity-informed leadership and how it can be practiced.

Complex Adaptive Team Systems (CATS): Scaling of a Team Leadership Development Model

“…Chaos theory, in this sense, describes a mathematical concept that delineates how within different systems, patterns appear but in a random fashion. [16] Complexity theory is also useful for understanding nonlinear systems [13,19,20]. Similarly, complex systems have been described as exhibiting butterfly effects in which a small change in the system could potentially lead to a large change overall [12,13,19].…”

“…Granted, however, even though it may seem that self-organizing systems come free to organizations in which they do not need to be managed, this thinking is counter-intuitive. Lindberg and Schneider [20] identified that order is not free when talking about self-organizing systems. Instead, leadership must be able to achieve the right balance between equilibrium and chaos without hampering the emergent processes that come from self-organizing systems [20].…”

“…Lindberg and Schneider [20] identified that order is not free when talking about self-organizing systems. Instead, leadership must be able to achieve the right balance between equilibrium and chaos without hampering the emergent processes that come from self-organizing systems [20]. Luoma [43] warned against efforts that try to eliminate this disorder, by eliminating this run toward chaos leaders can destroy the system's self-organizing capabilities.…”

“…Luoma [43] warned against efforts that try to eliminate this disorder, by eliminating this run toward chaos leaders can destroy the system's self-organizing capabilities. Here leadership plays a critical role in the self-organizing function [20], facilitating interactions with the system [48]. Organizations need to view leadership as an emerging construct that facilitates self-organizing behavior to achieve desirable outcomes [20].…”

Service quality and maturity of health care organizations through the lens of Complexity Leadership Theory

“…Social occurrences, including organizations, became the subject of research utilizing the methods and principles of complexity theory in the early 1990s . Later, complexity theorists developed the concept of complex adaptive systems (CAS) . Although originally used by researchers in the natural sciences, complexity theory is nowadays increasingly applied to analyse social organizations .…”