Exploring the leadership position of schools of medicine within academic health center administration: Implications for NIH funding utilizing resource dependence theory

The purpose of this work is to describe the leadership role of the school of medicine in relation to the overall academic health center and the implications of that role for National Institutes of Health funding based on 2001 and 2005 funding rankings. Resource Dependence theory, traditionally used in general industry, can be utilized to explain why the position of the school of medicine is so important in relation to outside funding for the academic health center as a whole. Utilizing the eight archetype taxonomy (WCJD Typology) developed by Weiner and colleagues (2001), a determination of relationship will be established comparing those archetypes to the NIH medical school funding rankings of 2001 and 2005 (n =98) based on the Low or High Academic Authority position of the School of Medicine within the Academic Health Center. Non-parametric techniques will be used to establish these relationships utilizing Spearman's Rank correlation coefficient and the Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Test to retain or reject the H0 of four hypotheses. Initial results indicated that on average, schools in the High Academic Authority ranking performed 14 ranks by average better than their Low Academic Authority counterparts. Due to the methods used to score the typological categories, there is high correlation throughout the matrix among some but not all categories. The test statistics reported were 0.047 for two-tailed (0.024 1t) for the 2001 ranking and 0.067 for two-tailed (0.034 1t) for 2005 at the .05 level. All four null-hypotheses were rejected. There is a possible association between the authority position of the School of Medicine within the AHC and that School's ability to achieve a higher rank in NIH funding. The implications of these results require further study but can be utilized as part of the larger body of work addressing resource dependency in the healthcare setting.