Introduction
Nursing is a stressful profession by its nature and also one where nearly every decision can be vital. As a result, conflicts frequently arise in it, with nurses possibly confronting their colleagues, managers, or patients. If not resolved, these conflicts can cause substantial damage to the organization and the quality of patient care. To address the issue, nursing leaders should study conflict management and improve their abilities in that regard. The subject is highly complex, with a variety of different personality types and management styles being discussed and considered. As such, there is no singular conflict management framework that is appropriate for every context. This paper will discuss the servant, transformational, and authoritarian conflict management styles, as they are the most prominent in the relevant literature. Nurses need to develop an approach to resolving different types of conflicts and follow it.
Servant Leadership in Conflict Management
In servant leadership, the manager recognizes and emphasizes their responsibility to their followers, serving their interests and needs through their work. According to Stanley (2016), it is based on ten principles: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to people’s growth, and community building. This type of leadership focuses on empowering individual staff members and helping them address their issues. As a result, instead of using their organizational power to force conflict resolution, servant leaders promote trust, collaboration, and empathy. Stanley (2016) notes the model’s effectiveness at addressing nurse turnover issues, to which conflicts can contribute. By promoting teamwork and the well-being of each staff member, servant leaders reduce the incidence of conflicts and make it easier to resolve them. With that said, servant leadership has some caveats that limit its applications in various contexts, which will be discussed below.
Servant leadership relies on the idea of the leader being strongly altruistic while retaining the competencies required of their position. Such leaders are not necessarily typical, especially because many organizations likely do not emphasize the characteristic when promoting workers. Stanley (2016) demonstrates the opinions of some scholars who consider servant leadership a leadership approach that is entirely theoretical and not based on evidence. As a result, it can be challenging to apply servant leadership in practice, and it may have unintended consequences that the theory did not predict. It is the leader’s task to analyze and address the problems that emerge without supporting examples, which requires substantial personal competencies. In the nursing environment, where decisions can affect patient health and possibly their lives, it may be advisable to adopt another approach that has been proven to be effective.
Transformational Leadership in Conflict Management
Transformational leadership is among the longest-known and best-established styles of leadership that emerged from scholarly theory. Scully (2015) claims that it emerged as a concept in 1978 or before that and took a central place in the discourse surrounding leadership in nursing. Leaders that follow this approach motivate workers to excel and attain growth goals by supplying a shared vision to which workers contribute willingly. Followers are empowered to pursue personal and organizational goals, working together to achieve excellent performance across the team. Similar to servant leaders, transformational leaders address conflicts by promoting teamwork and motivating workers to resolve conflicts themselves. However, the leader takes a more active role in the management of the organization and will likely interfere in conflicts to a higher degree. They are expected to mediate problems and help each side reach their goals.
The leadership style has been established in various fields throughout its existence and proven itself to be highly effective at improving various aspects of performance. Joseph and Huber (2015) identify it as the most popular approach in nursing, one that improves interprofessional coordination as well as the coordination of care, two substantial sources of conflict. These benefits have been proven to translate into practical advantages and further reinforce the attractiveness of the approach. Sfantou et al. (2017) find that transformational leadership contributes to reducing patient mortality and improving their satisfaction. With that said, the method requires the leader to inspire workers and convince them to follow organizational goals. Without the necessary competencies, it can become substantially less effective as the leader does not achieve their target and transition the team into a transformational state.
Authoritarian Leadership in Conflict Management
The authoritarian style of leadership is another prevalent approach in practical nursing environments, though research typically does not support its usage. The reason is that it is easy to implement, relying mostly on the leader’s position of power as the superior of the followers within the organization. According to Huber (2017), authoritarian leadership involves centralized decision-making by the leader, who gives orders to the other team members. The same consideration will typically be applied to conflicts, where an authoritarian leader will arbitrate, decide on the conflict’s outcome, and expect all sides to follow the decision. As such, conflict resolution in authoritarian leadership relies heavily on the leader’s personal competencies, which has both positive and negative implications. Because of the circumstances where it usually emerges, this trait generally makes it inadvisable.
An authoritarian leader with the personal capabilities to organize the team and achieve excellent performance will likely perform as well, or better, in other leadership styles. Moreover, they are likely to recognize the advantages of these other methods and choose to follow one, whether consciously or otherwise. As a result, the choice to continue using authoritarian leadership may be associated with moderate or lacking capacities as a leader. Murray (2017) claims that authoritarian leadership can lead nurses to have to work with limited resources, feel persecuted, lower morale, and foster conflict rather than prevent it. This finding suggests that authoritarian leadership is counterproductive to organizational performance and conflict management. As such, leaders should try to evaluate whether they are being authoritarian and change their practices to produce improved results if necessary.
Conclusion
Leadership is a vital factor in conflict management, particularly in nursing environments, where leaders are heavily involved in daily work. However, some nurse managers do not devote adequate time to considering their leadership practices and resort to authoritarian leadership. In doing so, they increase the incidence of conflicts and damage the performance of their team. With that said, there is no set theory of conflict management, particularly in nursing, and the most frequently used methods require substantial personal competencies. This author’s recommendation is that nurse leaders should be flexible, study various leadership approaches, and understand how to apply them depending on the situation. By understanding various leadership approaches and applying them where necessary, a leader can improve their personal competencies and achieve substantial performance improvements in the team.
References
Joseph, M. L., & Huber, D. (2015). Clinical leadership development and education for nurses: Prospects and opportunities. Journal of Healthcare Leadership, 7, 55–64.
Huber, D. (2017). Leadership and nursing care management (6th ed.). Elsevier Health Sciences.
Murray, E. (2017). Nursing leadership and management: For patient safety and quality care. F. A. Davis.
Scully, N. J. (2015). Leadership in nursing: The importance of recognizing inherent values and attributes to secure a positive future for the profession. Collegian, 22(4), 439-444.
Sfantou, D. F., Laliotis, A., Patelarou, A. E., Sifaki-Pistolla, D., Matalliotakis, M., & Patelarou, E. (2017). Importance of leadership style towards quality of care measures in healthcare settings: A systematic review. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 5(4), 73.
Stanley, D. (2016). Clinical leadership in nursing and healthcare: Values into action (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.