Conflict management is a challenge in every work environment but can be even more challenging in the ever-changing chaos of the health care environment.

In your discussion response, please address the following prompt:

• After reading the article by Joseph Grenny, Crucial Conversations: The Most Potent Force for Eliminating Disruptive Behavior, share two specific concepts that you found most beneficial.

Click here to access the article: Crucial Conversations: The Most Potent Force for Eliminating Disruptive Behavior. PDF attached to EMAIL

Please be sure to adhere to APA guidelines when citing sources.

Key Definition: Conflict

Conflict can be defined as the “clash, fight, battle or struggle” that occurs between two or more parties as a result of a real or perceived threat or difference exists in the desires, thoughts, attitudes, feelings, or behaviors of two or more parties (Tomey, 2009, p. 148).

Conflict is an inevitable part of everyday life; consequently, we must develop skills for conflict resolution and management. Is all conflict negative? No, conflict can be competitive or disruptive. What is the difference between organizational conflict and job conflict? When you consider the efforts of the organization to meets its mission, there are multiple daily conflicts occurring within different levels of the organization. Job conflict can be affected by role ambiguity, role overload, and role stress. In the health care environment, there is a constant struggle between limited resources (both fiscal and human) as well as values.

Conflict is constant and leaders and managers must be competent at managing conflict in a positive manner. The following figure provides the different types of conflict, such as intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup.

Types of Conflict

onflict management can be managed by using the steps of the nursing process: assess, analyze, plan, implement, and evaluate.

Conflict Resolution

Teams of employees use one of three primary approaches to conflict resolution: integrative, distributive, and mediating (Boundless Management, 2014).

• Integrative approaches focus on the issue to be solved and aim to find a resolution that meets everyone’s needs. Success with this tactic requires the exchange of information, openness to alternatives, and a willingness to consider what is best for the group as a whole rather than for any particular individual.
• Distributive approaches find ways to divide a fixed number of positive outcomes or resources in which one side comes out ahead of the other. Since team members have repeated interactions with each other and are committed to shared goals, the expectation of reciprocity can make this solution acceptable since those who don’t get their way today may end up “winning” tomorrow.
• Mediating approaches bring in a third party to facilitate a non-confrontational, non-adversarial discussion to help the team reach a consensus about how to resolve the conflict. A mediator from outside the team brings no emotional ties or preconceived ideas to the conflict and can help the team identify a broader set of solutions that would be satisfactory to all.

Although these three approaches all bring the overt conflict to an end, team cohesion can suffer if members perceive the process itself as unfair, disrespectful, or overly contentious. The result can be resentment that festers and leads to subsequent additional conflict that a more conciliatory process might have avoided.

Conflict Management

Trust plays a major role in conflict resolution, as does the ability to effectively communicate and negotiate.

The primary aim of conflict management is to promote the positive effects and reduce the negative effects that disputes can have on team performance without necessarily fully resolving the conflict itself. Teams use one of three main tactics to manage conflict: smoothing, yielding, and avoiding (Boundless Management, 2014).

• The smoothing approach attempts to minimize the differences among the people who are in conflict with each other. This strategy often focuses on reducing the emotional charge and intensity of how the people speak to each other by emphasizing their shared goals and commitments.
• The yielding approach describes the choice some team members make to simply give in when others disagree with them rather than engage in conflict. This is more common when the stakes are perceived to be small or when the team member’s emotional ties to the issue at hand are not particularly strong.
• In the avoiding approach, team members may choose to simply ignore all but the most contentious disagreements. While this can have short-term benefits and may be the best option when the team is under time pressure, it is the approach least likely to produce a sense of harmony among the team members.

While conflict can increase the engagement of team members, it can also create distractions and draw attention away from important tasks. Because conflict management seeks to contain such disruptions and threats to team performance, conflicts do not disappear so much as exist alongside the teamwork.

References

American Nurses Association. (2015). Joint ANA and National Council of State Boards of Nursing position statement—2005. Retrieved from http://nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/Policy-…

Boundless Management. (2014). Team conflict resolution and management. Boundless Management. Used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Retrieved from https://www.boundless.com/management/textbooks/bou…

Bradford, L. P. (1997). Group development (2nd ed.) San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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Porter-O’Grady, T., & Malloch, K. (2013). Leadership in nursing practice: Changing the landscape of health care. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Schermerhorn Jr., J. R., Hunt, J. G., & Osborn, R. N. (2003). Organizational Behavior (8th ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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University of Maryland University College, BMGT 364 online course. Author: Murray D. Blank.