Understanding vision and its role in health care environment

The organizational mission established by founding members provide organizations with a core purpose - what about vision? Ideally, vision should be providing the future picture of the organization i.e., what and where the organization would like to be in future state. While initial vision is created by the founding members, it must be recreated and renewed to meet the changing needs of the environment. Peter Drucker, a famous management consultant once said that the best way to predict the future is to create it. How do the organizations determine the path to their future? Does our organizational vision play any role in creating our future? Does it impact the organizational performance? Do we practice our vision? Does it guide us in planning and providing direction to the organization? Who should be creating it and how should vision be communicated and implemented? These are some of the important questions we had in our minds while preparing for this project. The research project is an effort to understand the vision construction, communication, and implementation process and to further determine a relationship between organizational vision statement and organizational performance. This study has used a mixed method approach starting from a thorough review of the theoretical and empirical literature with regards to vision content elements and organizational performance measures. This review was followed by an assessment of vision statements of best ranked healthcare organizations as declared by US News and World Report in various regions. A thematic analysis method was used to assess previously identified vision components in the vision statements. The visions statements were ranked on a scale of 0 to 3, wherein 0 was given to the organizations that did not have vision statement and 3 was given to the organizations that had all of the vision components identified in the ranking criteria. This information was further used to assess a correlation between organizational vision quality and its performance. A statistically significant correlation was found between vision statements for at least one of the financial or growth related performance measures assessed in 9 out of the 17 states studied. The present study re-emphasizes the importance of creating an effective vision statement, provides guidance for vision statement components, and further highlights the relationship of vision statements to organizational performance. We also performed an exploratory study to assess current practices in the healthcare environment by performing a leadership inquiry. In this study we have discussed various aspects of vision: starting from how literature defines vision, structural components of vision statement, vision communication and implementation process, and the studies that discuss the impact of vision on organizational performance. The survey instrument was created, which was based on the conceptual model developed by the investigator. This survey was electronically sent to the CEOs of 317 acute care hospitals selected from the 17 states of the United States. The response rate was not encouraging as only 7% responses were received. The paper presents a brief summary of the study