Interpersonal Conflict In Nursing

Introduction

Multi-disciplinary healthcare teams are important and critical in developing the comprehensive care and treatment for patients. Communication is indispensable for providing comprehensive services. One big challenge of communication between different parties in teams is causing the potential for conflict. Most of the organizations are inevitable encountering conflict and the clinical healthcare setting is no exception (Almost, 2006; Pavlakis et al., 2011).

The term conflict is described as a dynamic process underlying a wide variety of organizational behavior occurs whenever interdependent parties pursue incompatible goals, incompatible relationships or scarce resources which develop between two or more individuals in an organization

Kantek & Gezer (2009) has indicated that over 50% of the students frequently and 80% occasionally experienced conflicts. Some student nurses reported that they had experienced aggression and bullying in clinical settings from staff nurses, nursing managers, and patients and their families. Nursing students are particularly inexperienced, immature and unprepared to manage conflict and response in avoiding way frequently in conflict situations (Pines et al., 2014). Therefore, more attention and support should be provided to student nurses due to their inability to effectively manage the conflicts they

If conflicts can be successfully managed, student nurses may develop higher levels of motivation and productivity. On the contrary, if conflicts cannot be handled effectively and constructively student nurses may suffer from high stress and burnout, problems appear in interpersonal relations, a decrease in academic performance, and increasing rates of absenteeism (Kantek & Kartal, 2015; Pines et al., 2014).

How conflict appears toward student nurses

Conflicts can occur between students and faculty management, between students and managers, and between faculty management and instructors, it can also occur between students and instructors (Kantek & Gezer, 2009). The student nurses were mostly influenced and experience interpersonal conflicts with supervisors, colleagues and patients during clinical placement ( Arieli, 2013).

For the conflicts between student nurses and patients, the student nurses may face some shocking situations like patients’ suffering and death in the clinical setting. The students may thus experience some negative emotion and develop intrapersonal conflicts. Otherwise, some patients and their relatives are being discourteous and unreasonable toward healthcare providers that student nurses may encounter aggressive language and