The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment

Paper Info
Page count 6
Word count 1670
Read time 7 min
Topic Health
Type Essay
Language 🇺🇸 US

Creating a safe environment for nurses is one of the major priorities in today’s healthcare systems. When nurses recognize their obligations, they are in a position to set clear goals and choose appropriate sources for their work. They cooperate, exchange information, and improve their qualities regularly. The workplace environment has a certain impact on patient outcomes, including the patients’ recuperation rate, the quality of services, and well-being. When nurses experience conflicts, it becomes hard to cooperate, which results in a variety of mistakes and shortages. Unreasonable differences in salaries, access to equipment, and unstable working schedules provoke interpersonal and organizational conflicts. Conflicts deprive nurses of a variety of opportunities like gathering patient information, discussing accidents, and participating in improvement activities. The quality of care is unstable and changes because of nurses’ attitudes toward their tasks. Therefore, effective leadership and management are necessary for care success, and hospitals are ready to contribute to these areas. This project aims at discussing the presence of conflict in the workplace and its impact on the nursing environment, as well as patient well-being and recuperation speed and rate.

The presence of conflict in the workplace affects the effectiveness of the nursing environment, thereby disorienting the rate and speed of patient recuperation and well-being. According to Shah (2017), healthcare providers must understand their roles and work effectively, avoiding interpersonal conflicts and respecting each other’s values, to achieve desired outcomes in patient care. The reduction of negative behaviors is a part of conflict management in terms of which nurses are able to listen and succeed in decision-making. Cullati et al. (2019) state that conflicts have serious consequences for patient well-being, including failures to provide timely services or focus on patient-centered care. It is not enough to consider team conflicts as a threat to healthcare quality but to elaborate new conflict management strategies and hire more quality managers and leaders. The offered evidence supports the research claim because it underlines the importance of clinical knowledge and interpersonal relationships within the same nursing team. However, critics would argue that despite the good intentions to create favorable working environments, even the most professional teams are not immune to conflicts. Piryani and Piryani (2017) admit that conflicts may become a good motivation to improve the environment and find our organizational weaknesses. Admittedly, there are no guarantees that one perfectly solved conflict could eliminate the emergence of new conflicts between the same people or within the same facility. Nevertheless, the argument that resolving one conflict does not prevent others from emerging does not hold because unresolved issues ultimately affect performance. Therefore, the most logical thing to do when conflicts arise is to address the underlying issues comprehensively to allow nurses to continue delivering their services where they are needed the most.

Additionally, patients expect high-quality support from their nurses to assist in their recovery, but conflicts negatively affect this objective. A study by Cullati et al. (2019) found that the most common effects of conflicts in the workplace in a healthcare set-up include the failure to provide patient-centered, timely, and efficient care. The core of nursing is to ensure that patients get the necessary care services when they need them. Additionally, to deliver quality care to patients, nurses have to work in teams amongst themselves and other interdisciplinary teams. Conflict affects the smooth coordination of activities, thus ultimately impacting the manner in which services are delivered. This argument could be countered by the claim that there are many other additional factors that define the speed and rate of patient well-being, including procedure length and medication choices. For instance, even without conflict, if the appropriate procedures and systems are not put in place, the quality of care delivered to patients would be affected negatively. Therefore, pointing to conflict as the leading cause of poor quality services could be a subjective claim. However, while there are other various factors that contribute to poor quality services, conflict in the workplace among nurses exacerbates the problem. For instance, even without the proper systems being put in place, when nurses work together as a team they could easily become creative and solve any emerging issues. As such, a conflict would stifle any efforts for collaboration leading to poor service delivery and hence negative patient outcomes.

Similarly, the presence of conflicts in the workplace could reduce the speed of recovery in patients because of poor communication. According to Vermeir et al. (2015), the efficiency of delivering care is fundamentally and critically dependent on effective communication among all the involved care providers. Therefore, in the presence of conflict, nurses are unlikely to communicate effectively. From a general standpoint, when two sides are conflicting, they are bound to stay away from each other for as long as possible. In the same way, when workplace conflicts arise, the warring sides are would seek to avoid each other, and in the process, communication is cut off, which ultimately affects the recovery of patients. For instance, there should be a smooth transition when handing over shifts between nurses, and this important aspect requires effective communication. Conflicts imply that such a smooth transition is interfered with and patients could end up getting the wrong mediation or missing important procedures, which ultimately affect the speed of their recovery. In response to this argument, a critic would claim that when conflicts occur, nurses are involved in multiple interventions to improve their work quality. However, as a rebuttal, while this statement is true, conflict occurs in stages starting with initiation and ending with a resolution. Therefore, in the period between the occurrence and resolution of a conflict (the period when nurses seek multiple interventions) patient safety and speed of recovery are affected negatively. In other words, before a conflict is identified and resolved, it could have caused widespread damage to the well-being of patients.

In addition, patient recuperation depends on professional nursing care, and conflicts reduce care quality in different ways. According to Cullati et al. (2019), conflicts can alter “team dynamics and communication, decrease trust and team performance, and lead to poor mental health among professionals” (p. 43). Additionally, team conflicts could distract healthcare professionals’ attention and draw it away from patients coupled with draining their personal resources, which is a threat to the workplace safety and environment, thus ultimately affecting the quality of care. In the process, the professional attributes of nursing are affected and consequently, the quality of services offered degenerates. One of the opposing arguments to this statement is that there are not enough studies discussing the relationship between workplace conflicts and patient well-being. However, the lack of studies in this area does not mean that the effects of conflicts in the workplace do not affect the patients’ well-being. From deductive reasoning, if the well-being of patients is highly dependent on the professionalism of nurses, then anything that affects this aspect has a negative bearing on the services delivered.

Finally, the well-being of patients is one of the primary goals of nurses, and if conflicts occur in the workplace, this goal is replaced by the need to resolve the underlying conflict. For instance, as Cullati et al. (2019) posit, “team conflicts are detrimental to patient-centeredness. This result echoes an ethnographic study of morning inter-professional rounds in intensive care, which showed that conflicts prevented teams from involving patients in their own care” (p. 48). As such, decisions are made in isolation without involving patients and asking for their opinions as part of the principle of autonomy. When patients are not involved in their care, the care outcomes are likely to be poor (Jerofke-Owen & Dahlman, 2019). However, it could be argued that effective leadership is required to manage conflicts in the nursing workplace, and patient care may not directly depend on conflicts only. While this statement is true, the role of conflicts in affecting patient-centered care cannot be overlooked. As mentioned earlier, conflict among workers aggravates any other underlying problems and collectively they affect the quality of care delivered to patients.

The best approach for completing a study on the effects of workplace conflict on nurses’ working environment and interference with patient recuperation is the use of a qualitative review. The research plan will entail the use of past studies focusing on the selected topic. The strategy will present additional insights into workplace-related conflict and how it affects nurses and patients (Cullati et al., 2019). The presented information will form the basis for a powerful model that can help address this problem and support the outcomes of more individuals. Some complications might emerge from this study design. One, the plan might not expose most of the causes and impacts of conflicts in nursing environments. Two, the model might be biased depending on the consulted articles and publications. The researcher will have to consider these possible challenges and solve them efficiently to deliver meaningful results.

In conclusion, nursing theories and concepts promote the best procedures and actions that resonate with patients’ needs. Leaders in such settings need to apply their skills to solve emerging challenges and differences that might affect the quality and nature and medical care. Unfortunately, some gaps occur that affect the overall experiences and outcomes of different individuals. In terms of overview, conflicts might occur due to poor leadership, personal differences, and the absence of morale. Some workers might become less involved and identify new ways to oppress their colleagues. Such problems have the potential to influence patients’ medical experiences and outcomes negatively. This paper has explained how workplace conflicts affect nurses’ working environment and interfere with patient recuperation. The success of the nursing practice is highly dependent on teamwork and conflict affects this aspect negatively, which ultimately means that nurses do not work optimally to deliver care services to patients. Consequently, the quality of care outcomes becomes poor as patients are not involved in their own care process and nurses do not work collaboratively. Therefore, there is an urgent need to further understand how conflict affects the work environment and patients’ speed of recovery, which necessitates the importance of this study.

References

Cullati, S., Bochatay, N., Maître, F., Laroche, T., Muller-Juge, Blondon, K. S., Perron, N. J., Bajwa, N. M., Vu, N. V., Kim, S., Savoldelli, G. L., Hudelson, P., Chopard, P., Nendaz, M. R. (2019). When team conflicts threaten quality of care: A study of health care professionals’ experiences and perceptions. Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Innovations, Quality & Outcomes, 3(1), 43-51. Web.

Jerofke-Owen, T., & Dahlman J. (2019). Patients’ perspectives on engaging in their healthcare while hospitalized. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 28(1-2):340-350. Web.

Piryani, R. M., & Piryani, S. (2019). Conflict management in healthcare. Journal of Nepal Health Research Council, 16(41), 481-482. Web.

Shah M. (2017). Impact of interpersonal conflict in health care setting on patient care; the role of nursing leadership style on resolving the conflict. Nurse & Care Open Access Journal, 2(2), 44-46. Web.

Vermeir, P., Vandijck, D., Degroote, S., Peleman, R., Verhaeghe, R., Mortier, E., Hallaert, G., Van Daele, S., Buylaert, W., & Vogelaers, D. (2015). Communication in healthcare: a narrative review of the literature and practical recommendations. International Journal of Clinical Practice, 69(11), 1257–1267. Web.

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EssaysInCollege. (2022, July 20). The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment. Retrieved from https://essaysincollege.com/the-effects-of-workplace-conflict-on-nurses-working-environment/

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EssaysInCollege. (2022, July 20). The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment. https://essaysincollege.com/the-effects-of-workplace-conflict-on-nurses-working-environment/

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"The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment." EssaysInCollege, 20 July 2022, essaysincollege.com/the-effects-of-workplace-conflict-on-nurses-working-environment/.

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EssaysInCollege. (2022) 'The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment'. 20 July.

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EssaysInCollege. 2022. "The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment." July 20, 2022. https://essaysincollege.com/the-effects-of-workplace-conflict-on-nurses-working-environment/.

1. EssaysInCollege. "The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment." July 20, 2022. https://essaysincollege.com/the-effects-of-workplace-conflict-on-nurses-working-environment/.


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EssaysInCollege. "The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment." July 20, 2022. https://essaysincollege.com/the-effects-of-workplace-conflict-on-nurses-working-environment/.

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EssaysInCollege. 2022. "The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment." July 20, 2022. https://essaysincollege.com/the-effects-of-workplace-conflict-on-nurses-working-environment/.

1. EssaysInCollege. "The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment." July 20, 2022. https://essaysincollege.com/the-effects-of-workplace-conflict-on-nurses-working-environment/.


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EssaysInCollege. "The Effects of Workplace Conflict on Nurses’ Working Environment." July 20, 2022. https://essaysincollege.com/the-effects-of-workplace-conflict-on-nurses-working-environment/.