Case studies in rehabilitating dysfunctional but highly influential hospital employees: Diagnostics and tools for leaders

Abstract

Highly influential, but dysfunctional, employees are especially problematic in hospitals because the ubiquity of teamwork in hospitals enables poor attitudes and dysfunction to spread quickly, and because of the unusually high cost of errors and underperformance. In addition, medical providers often form durable bonds with patients and in their communities, which increases the consequences of sanctioning these influential, but underperforming, employees. Using hospital case studies, relevant empirical literature and practical knowledge from experience in multiple health care systems, the authors describe three types of dysfunctional, but influential, employees and detail what hospital leaders can do to reliably revitalise or safely remove them.