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The conflict that is occurring at General Hospital is the doctors are interested in achieving personal benefits from employees of pharmaceutical companies hat distributes to the hospital. For the most part organizations consider this a conflict of interest. The doctors’ focus is not on their patients but on obtaining personal benefits. The Hospital pays each doctor and clinician that is employed a high salary and the pharmaceutical companies are aware that the doctors are interested in favors if they use products at the hospital.
This dilemma has caused employees of the pharmaceutical companies to easily get their products in the General Hospital which from time to time is a complicated task for many pharmaceutical companies. Since the doctors have began this practice it has become a serious dilemma for the hospital. The ways to manage the cost incurred in availing the desirable pharmaceutical resources in the Hospital are also facing some difficulties. Some pharmaceutical companies increased the prices of their products in order to give some share to the doctors that support their company.
Some professionals at the General Hospital have positive thoughts of the result. The parties that have conflict are the CEO Mike Hammer and the doctors represented by the Director of Medicine DRP. Mark Williams. Mr.. Hammer faced opposition from the hospitals’ board of trustees. The hospital was not competitive and was losing money. Mr.. Hammer was not capable to influence the doctors or the board to adhere to any cost containing measures or resolutions. To compound this dilemma, he assigned authority to Marge Harding the Chief Operating Officer of the hospital to deal with and resolve the situation.
Ms. Harding had personal goals to accomplish and would use this opportunity to attain them. The level of this conflict would be classified as Intercrop Conflict. “Intercrop conflict refers to opposition, disagreements, and disputes between groups or teams” (Helloing and Slouch) in this case between the doctors, the board of trustees and management. The doctors had taken a firm stand and they did not listen to any ideas or thoughts from the CEO concerning cost containment. 2. Discuss the conflict management styles that are evident in the case.
Conflict management styles are the pattern of conduct a person grows in reaction to conflict with others for example disagreements. Conflict management styles tend to be steady. Conflict management is the ability required to resolve different resistances. According to Helloing and Slouch (2011), there are five conflict handling styles: Collaborating Style, Compromising Style, Forcing Style, Accommodating Style, and Avoiding Style. In the beginning Mike Hammer started with the Collaborating Style. The collaborating style refers to high level of cooperative and assertive behaviors and represents win-win approach to interpersonal conflict handling’ (Helloing and Slouch). Mr.. Hammer would sit down with the doctors and hear their concerns, as well as voice their own. Once each party has had a chance to have their say, Mr.. Hammer would then try to find a solution that would make both parties happy if possible. If not, Mr.. Hammer would choose the solution that is best for the hospital. Later on, Mr.. Hammer and Mrs..
Harding were using the forcing style. “The forcing style refers to assertive and uncooperative behaviors and represents a win-lose approach to interpersonal conflict” (Helloing and Slouch). Mr.. Hammer made a decision regarding the conflict, it didn’t matter how the doctors felt about the situation. Mr.. Hammer and Mrs.. Harding made a decisions without hearing everyone’s side or taking anyone’s feelings onto account. Managers who uses this style with make their own decision in what would be best and the decisions would not be up for discussion.
Finally, when the doctors complained about Mrs.. Harding firing DRP. Borer to implement the new EGG system, Mr.. Hammer used the avoiding approach. “The avoiding style refers to unassertive and uncooperative behaviors. ” (Helloing and Slouch). Mr.. Hammer completely ignored the conflict at hand. Mr.. Hammer did not take any steps to eliminate the conflict. 3. Discuss how General Hospital could have used teams to address the cost reductions needed to stay competitive.
According to Helloing and Slouch (2011), team is defined as a small number of employees with complementary competencies who are committed to common performance goals and working relationships for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. General Hospital should assemble a team to solve the cost reduction problems. A group of individuals have broader base of ideas; therefore they could have created multiple solutions for the cost reductions needed at General Hospital.
The teams should consist of doctors, nurses, and physicians under different departments for example obstetrician, radiologist, podiatrists, etc and then the previous and past of cost data should have been analyzed to study the pattern. General Hospital should use the cross-functional team. According to Helloing and Slouch (2011 cross-functional team is defined as a team that has members drawn from various work areas whose goal is to identify and solve mutual problems.
Cross- functional teams may function for a long period of time, or they can disperse after the dilemma has been dealt with or solved and their objectives have been met. Cross-functional teams occasionally used to promote improvement, swiftness, and center on answering to client needs. If General Hospital use cross-functional team approach they would take employees with variable levels of talents and expertise knowledge brought together to solve the problem and reach a goal. General Hospital would need to provide the team with a variety of data to come to a resolution.
The team would pull data from all functional departments of the hospital. The team would also need information from all levels of management in the hospital. 4. Describe how Hammer can use negotiation skills to get buy-in for the cost reductions. According to Helloing and Slouch (2011), negotiation is a process in which two or more interdependent individuals or groups who perceive that they have both common and conflicting goals state and discuss proposals and preferences for specific terms off possible agreement.
Effective negotiation helps you to resolve situations that involve conflicts. Mr.. Hammer should use the win-win negotiation to find a solution that is acceptable to both parties, and leaves both parties feeling that they’ve won, in some way, after the conflict. Integrative negotiation or win-win can be complicated, as it tend to require a absentia amount of compromise on both sides. Groups of people who are used to working together may have to believe the negotiation to be more of a group effort, rather than a competition.
Although this can be hard at first, many people who have occurrence with integrative negotiation find that it can work out to be useful for both sides. Usually, most negotiations work on a distributive foundation. Distributive negotiation works on the standard that both sides will be out to get the deal which best helps them. This is often imitated in the assumptions analyst cake about how a theoretical set of negotiations will continue and be resolved. In these circumstances, the two parties are likely to see any gain as the other party’s loss and vice versa.
Integrative negotiation can take this matter off the table by looking for the best position for all parties involved. The negotiation itself is a careful examination Of your position and the other person’s position, with the objective of finding a equally tolerable compromise that gives you both as much of what you want as feasible. People’s positions are seldom as fundamentally opposed as they may at first appear – the other person may have very different objectives from the ones you expect. 5. Recommend a strategy for Hammer to resolve the problem.
I recommend that Mr.. Hammer use the integrative negotiations strategy. “Integrative negotiations involve joint problems solving to achieve results that benefit both parties. It can also be referred as win-win negotiation. It is an alternate strategy to the more common negotiation technique of simply trying to come up with the best possible outcome for your own side, known as distributive negotiation. The idea of integrative negotiation is to work together to find the outcome that best helps both sides.
This requires both sides to put more effort than usual into understanding what the other side requires and desires from a deal. Even though transformations are in order, this should be a method which assess any and all cost reduction purposes for all the areas, not only concentrate on doctors’ salaries. Also, the doctors who would like to remain at the hospital should be aware of the situation of the hospital. With self-interest and overconfidence, no one would get any benefit. Mrs.. Harding should change her approach. She should have focused more on the hospital oils, instead of her long term career expectations.