In aveterinary hospital, people work rather closely together and it can often causeconflict. Strong personalities mixed with stressful situations, animals’ liveson the line and complicated medicine and surgery cases can escalate conflictsituations. But what is conflict and how can one better manage it?
Conflict isdefined as a disagreement between two or more parties who perceive a threat totheir needs, interests or concerns and can be divided into constructive anddestructive conflict.
Constructiveconflict is functional, adaptive and positive whereas dysfunctional conflictfocuses on emotions and differences between the parties involved. Dysfunctionalconflict does not only impact the employee or close work colleagues, but thepractice’s overall performance.
To create amore harmonious workplace, the key is to determine the sources of conflictwithin your practice and ensure that you find a way to manage it appropriately forpositive outcomes. Uniting employees around a common goal, vision or standardof care you as a practice wants to deliver to clients can help reduce negativeeffects of conflict.
What arethe sources of conflict?
- Differingtask goals
- Disagreementsover what needs to be accomplished
- Differingprocess goals
- Disagreementsover how the task or goal needs to be accomplished
- Interpersonaldifferences
- Experiencingdifferences in personality, motivation or aspiration
- Resourceconstraints
- Competitionor incompatibility over perceived or actual resources
- Change
- Theuncertainty around change causes insecurity and interpersonal conflict
- Differingvalues
- Actualor perceived incompatibilities in what individuals believe is right or wrong,doing what is best for the patient or prolonging suffering or what is fair orunfair
- Poorcommunication
- Whenmembers of the team are misinformed, interpret information differently,disagree about how the laboratory reports should be interpreted and receivelack of information
- Taskinterdependence
- Whenone veterinarian or veterinary nurse is dependent on another for information orresources or needs one procedure to be completed before the other can continue
- Organizationalstructure
- Ifthe organizational structure prevents employees to speak up and implementchange, especially when they learned a new way of doing something at a CPDevent
Unfortunately,the conflict situation often escalates and discussions lead to arguments,debates, frustrations, non-communication, attacking each other’s character orpublic face, annihilation of opponent and accepting own destruction as long asthe opponent is also destroyed. The best way to handle these situations if byactively de-escalating conflict. Tactics to de-escalate conflict includeempathetic listening, shifting attention from self to the other, delay tacticsto create time to cool off and diffuse emotions, controlling your body languagethat the other person does not see you as threatening, seek a win-win situationand staying focused on the issue at hand. It is also important that once theconflict situation is resolved, that you re-establish trust between theparties.
As apractice owner or manager, it is vital that interpersonal relationships aremanaged well, in order to help employees thrive. This can be done by evaluatingeach team member’s interpersonal management style. When someone has low pursuitof self-interest coupled with low concern for others, he or she will likelyavoid conflict. Individuals with high concern for others, but low pursuit ofself-interest will be accommodating. A high pursuit of self-interests coupledwith a low concern for others will result in competition, whereas a high concernfor others and high pursuit of self-interest will lead to collaboration. Whenan individual is in the middle of these, it is likely that they will search forcompromises to be made.
Just as itis good for you to know where your colleagues natural conflict managementstyles are – it is even more important that you understand whether you like to compete, collaborate,compromise, avoid or accommodate.
Conflict is good, it can help drive positive change and practice progression, however, itis only possible if managed correctly. If you are able to increase yournegotiating skills, gain insight into others’ perspectives, gain emotionalintelligence skills, identify what you are willing and not willing to be partof, try to identify sources of leverage and use them effectively, it will giveyou the edge to manage conflict constructively.
