Conflict Management in Healthcare

Creating a Culture of Cooperation

Garry McDaniel

• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781646632152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie pharmaceutique, biotechnologique et de la santé

A central principle of the healthcare profession is caring for others: do no harm. Yet in healthcare settings, the level of conflict among healthcare professionals and administrators is rampant. As a result, patient care suffers, and poor communication, bullying, hazing, harassment, and incivility is often widespread and tolerated in hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, and clinics across the world. Conflict Management in Healthcare: Creating a Culture of Cooperation explains how to create an organizational culture and develop the interpersonal skills to turn everyday conflict into opportunities for enhancing interpersonal, team, and organizational relationships and patient care.

Chapter 1

THE CONFLICT-MEDIATION SYSTEM

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

—Peter Drucker

In This Chapter

The focus of chapter one is to help you understand the impact of conflict on the patients, customers, employees, managers, suppliers, and other key stakeholders that comprise or interact with your healthcare organization. You will learn about the cost of unproductive conflict and how individuals typically respond in situations of conflict. You will also learn the primary causes of conflict and the benefits of an effective system for addressing conflicts when they occur. Finally, you will be introduced to the conflict-mediation system that provides organizations and individuals with a method for resolving conflict at the lowest possible level and enhances productivity and respectful interpersonal relationships.

Employees, managers, and administrators in healthcare organizations live and work in a time of increasing pressure and challenges at home and work to do more, with less, and to do so better and faster. Demands for high-quality care, cost control, competition for jobs, and public scrutiny is fierce. Professionals in healthcare organizations often find themselves rushing through life on very little sleep, too much coffee, and under extraordinary pressure to be the perfect employee, caregiver, parent, friend, and associate. As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz observe in The Power of Full Engagement, “We use words like obsessed, crazed and overwhelmed not to describe insanity, but instead to characterize our daily lives.” Does this sound a little like a typical day in your life?

Is it any wonder that under these trying conditions healthcare professionals face increasing levels of stress and conflict at home, work, and in their personal life? Simply put, unproductive conflict is taking a toll on personal well-being, as well as eating away at the health and prosperity of healthcare organizations.

Research in healthcare organizations has consistently found that unproductive conflict and incivility are becoming increasingly commonplace. The resulting negative behaviors and poor communication have led the Joint Commission (2008) to call for zero tolerance to negative behaviors such as bullying, harassment, and incivility, as well as the implementation of a code of conduct for all employees and an organization-wide approach for addressing disruptive behaviors in the workplace. Clearly, healthcare organizations need to do more to ensure a workplace where clear communication, trust, transparency, and the ability to work productively through differences ensures patient safety, and high-quality products and services.

LEADERSHIP and CONFLICT

We believe everyone in an organization is a leader and equally responsible for both creating positive conflict and resolving unproductive conflict. This viewpoint supports the current recognition that organizations are not static institutions—they have evolved over time, and each evolution has resulted in increased levels of maturity, consciousness, and complexity. Each stage has required organizations to view themselves and their relationship with those who accomplish the work differently. This may sound a bit paradoxical, so let us take this sentence apart so you understand why we believe this to be true.

Everyone Is a Leader, and Organizations Evolve

First, in today’s world, the most innovative companies view everyone as a leader. Of course, this has not always been true. For the great span of human history, leadership was a position bestowed upon the king, pharaoh, queen, tsar, or emperor by a deity. In other words, a god divinely appointed someone as “leader,” and everyone else did what they were told—or else! This was true in organizations for thousands of years.

Then, only 200 years ago, the world experienced the industrial revolution and changed from an agriculturally based economy to a factory system. Organizations had to evolve again, and the workplace became increasingly more democratic, with more participative forms of leadership becoming more prevalent. In addition, for the first time in history, in the new industrial work setting, with the right experience or education, individuals could rise through the ranks and take on management and leadership roles. In these organizations, there was still a very strong and clearly defined hierarchy, but “followers” were given more autonomy in how to accomplish directives from management.

With the advent of the “information age,” organizations began to realize that to be nimble, competitive, and innovative, they needed to push “empowerment” throughout the organization. This meant giving employees even more room to grow, develop, and give “bottom-up” input into policies, processes, and work conditions. In the past twenty years, more and more innovative companies have begun to place a strong emphasis on vision and values. However, you have probably noticed that while it is easy for an organization to create and articulate a vision and values, attaining consistency between what is said and what is done is very difficult. Note that while they are more participative, “information-age” organizations are still top-down hierarchies where senior administrators and highly educated professionals wield the greatest power and control. So, while these organizations are more participative, there is frequently a large gap between what the company says it values, and a company culture that still allows bullying, incivility, disrespect, hazing, and harassment to exist. The result is probably what you are seeing in your organization right now: low morale, high turnover, lack of teamwork, decreased quality, increased mistakes, poor communication, unproductive conflict, and an increase in sick leave and grievances.

Notice in the three stages presented above, over time organizations found it necessary to change the way they were organized and how they viewed employees. Organizations evolved from absolute monarchies to the machine-age view that people could advance in their role, to the information age where teamwork and participation are valued. As each evolution occurred, organizations became vastly more productive, and better places to work.

Despite these advances, people sense that the way organizations are operated and managed today is not working. According to the Gallup organization, only 34 percent of workers in the United States and 13 percent of employees and managers worldwide come to work feeling enthusiastic, involved in, and committed to their workplace. This means that somewhere between 66 percent and 87 percent of your workforce is showing up to work every day to either go through the motions of doing their job, or actively drain the productivity, quality, and vitality from the organization. The good news is that plenty of organizations have developed and implemented effective cultures for addressing unproductive conflict. If they can do it, so can you.

Take a minute to consider what the most innovative companies are doing that is different from what most other companies are doing. These innovative organizations have an intense focus on establishing cultures in which all employees can align their professional and life purpose with that of the organization. They focus on creating safe, collaborative, respectful work environments where everyone is a leader who has the skills to do their job and share their opinion and perspective. Today’s organizations recognize that hiring talented people who can align behind and support the purpose and values of the organization is the key to success. So, if your organization is still struggling with reducing the gap between the values and quality of care, products, or services you say is important, and an environment where people have learned to “just do what they are told,” your organization is being left behind. It is time to evolve.

We hope that the individuals in your organization with lofty titles and salaries are also effective leaders, but today’s employees are keenly aware that titles and big salaries do not mean a person is a good leader. Nor do titles and salaries ensure effective communication, teamwork, and collaboration. Truly great leaders are able to influence themselves and others to achieve positive outcomes in an ethical manner. This means anyone in an organization can...