Critical Appraisal of Work Values of Hospital Leaders- a Case Study Conducted in Reputed Private Hospital, Bangalore

Trust at work comes from living values that one sermonizes on a daily basis and defines the character of an individual or group. To echo one value and act another will obviously dent the trust of all the stakeholders involved. Work values are those guiding principles that steer the behavior of individuals at work and helps create and sustain trust and become normative codes to follow when it permeates down from the top management. This is especially true for the healthcare industry where work values are critical and sensitive. In the face of adversity that hospitals are today, with tragedies like the AMRI Hospital fire in Kolkata in Dec 2011 and scores of such incidents questioning the existence of work values, it becomes increasingly imperative to understand what work values drives such culpable behavior especially when medical tourism is in its boom phase in India. It is without a doubt that the work values of the leadership become the norms that influence the code of conduct for everybody in the organization to follow. In this paper, the authors made an attempt to critically evaluate the work values that are deemed to be vital for hospital leaders of a private hospital in Bangalore by administering a checklist of work values to the hospital leadership based on Capability Maturity Model framework by dividing them into ethical and operational work values. By scrutinizing the work values of the organization, a leadership work values model was developed based on the principles of Paretos analysis