Nursing -- Health Care Administration and Leadership

The modern clinical health care environment can be highly stressful for employees and lead to various types of conflicts in the workplace. Within nursing, those conflicts typically manifest themselves as abuse of authority as between different levels of authority, a hostile climate with respect to reporting problems, scheduling preferences, and numerous problems associated with social cliques within health care teams and nursing units. If not addressed by administration, power struggles often develop, requiring negotiation and conflict management after the fact. In general, the conflict management strategies of avoidance, accommodation, smoothing, and competing are not particularly helpful. Instead, administrative policies emphasizing negotiation and collaboration is the most appropriate conflict management approach within nursing units and the enforcement of clear administrative policies and protocols are the most effective method of minimizing conflict as between different hierarchical levels of authority.

Negotiation and Conflict Management in the...
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