Managing Conflict: Decision-Making Process in Organizations Case Study

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A conflict in any organization occurs when there is an involvement of many parties in duty performance. This happens because the parties concerned have different goals and interests to accomplish. In many organizational structures, different conflicts may arise such as fund allocation, terms of employment, retrenchments and promotions.

This mostly occurs when one business is liable to another, such as the government or business partners. The directors and stakeholders of the firm are in charge of decision-making. The employees implement the decision with the help of supervisors or departmental heads.

This usually depends on the organizational structure of the individual entity. The structure divides the firm into elements of similar abilities and skills. These elements may include accounts, human resource, and production departments. Firms must always avoid conflict of interest since they cause operational problems (Learmonth, 2006).

A conflict may arise when a given department performs better than the others in service delivery to their customers regardless of the underlying drivers. The management will put more effort into this department, and allocate more funds to improve its performance. This creates a conflict of resource allocation since more reflects towards the most delivering department and management may overstate the allocations.

More personnel shift to this department and may bring about the conflict among the employees and management, caused by allocation through relations and nepotism. Employees expect the management to give promotions to personnel within the organization. Conflicts arise when a person from outside the business entity takes a position at top management levels (Ury & Fisher, 1998).

Businesses also lay off employees in order to decrease expenses. A conflict arises as to which employees to send off. Conflicts of interest also arise from the employee and management duties, where each of them requires jobs to meet deadlines as well as fairness to the employee, so as not to overload them and maintain timing.

The organization at which I work is the Carolina Center for Behavioral Health. This institution has conflicts between physicians and clients because it is necessary for numerous interactions to occur between the patient and doctor for better service delivery. This, in turn, causes conflicts to arise from differences in personal expectations, responsibilities and insufficient resources, which are scarce.

Conflicts in this institution also arise from among the physicians, the management team and physicians and between other professionals and the physicians (Hellriegel & Slocum, 2010).

There arises competition for the scarce resources in the entity, and as to whether personal physicians can act as referrals or which would be the best source of their decision-making. This deteriorates the trust among physicians in resource allocation since the most salient issues is not aligned.

Conflict resolution occurs through the correction of differences between the parties involved. A conflict may be positive or negative. Negotiation as a method of conflict resolution involves creating a gap between people and the problem, generation of ideas that give options, following interests, laying out of goals and objectives, and using gains to define success.

An integrative approach allows the discovery of mutual gains and fair standards for decision making on challenging issues. It uses several stages to resolve conflict between the parties. First, the parties lay down their similar goals that led to the conflict. They then remove the personalization of the problem and make it professional as per the situation.

A study on the driving factor occurs in the demand brought in by an interest. The parties then use creativity to bring mutual gain options that bring satisfaction to all that improves the situation. This happens using the facts and data analysis as the nature of the physician profession (Hellriegel & Slocum, 2010).

In order to implement the negotiation strategy to resolve a conflict, the physicians have to put into consideration various factors.

The committee formed has to be free of conflicts by ensuring that all members are aware of their roles and to whom the decision-making role lays. The parties whom the conflict concerns should be the sole members of the committee and it should involve physicians with rich information on the issue at hand.

In any medical institution, Evidence based management should be instituted since it deals with facts for decision-making. This arose since there are many differences between physicians such as culture and decision making processes used. Managers and students in health care institutions receive education on evidence based management practices.

Managers are diverse and dynamic because of their wide scope of knowledge that enables them to be reliable in making judgments. Evidence based management requires careful and thorough analysis of data used for decision-making that staff record on the organizational functioning.

It requires managers to share and record problems through a wide range of research and experiments before making decisions. This gives them time to discuss the problem related facts and a choice on the best research analysis by managers and employees.

Evidence based management should be instituted at all levels of the organization structure. All new and old members of staff should be trained on how to use massive research to come up with decisions. This will ensure that the whole institution at large embraces the use of evidence-based management.

Physicians should use facts from previous research to administer drugs to their patients and make new experiments before giving prescriptions on new cases. This will boost the overall credibility of the institution to its clients and stakeholders.

The staff in the organization move into the community of concern for their patients come from and collects data on issues affecting them. This can be conducted using cheap experiments that the organization can afford. It also requires that the institution acquire a license granting it permission to collect public data.

The management should be flexible to accept junior staff facts that will assist the institution to deliver quality services to its clients. When a decision takes position, experiments occur to prove the decision’s efficiency to work. This practice ensures that decisions made are effective and that only the best methods used in conducting a given activity.

It also removes the use of believers to administer professional services and reduces the risk of drawbacks from work done by the use of latest experiment results. Physicians should ensure that the cure to a given problem is appropriate and that it has minimal side effects (Hellriegel & Slocum, 2010).

The management should institute evidence-based management by demanding evidence from the physicians on decisions made. The physicians should be discouraged from using experience knowledge to administer drugs and prescriptions to patients. This goes hand in hand with the use of personal information from own ideologies that emanate from own experiences or those of close relatives.

The staff and management should also eliminate their personal preferences that market drugs from companies believed to be the best. The experiments should prove which drugs are best for a given ailment. The market forces of demand and supply should neither be a factor in making a choice in the administration of services nor the desire to follow known professional’s decisions.

The managers should embrace originality from all staff members regardless of their rank. This ensures that promotions rewarded to personnel create equality, thus promoting equity in the firm and preventing conflict opportunities.

Creative decision-making involves selection of an action plan from many alternatives to arrive at a solution through generation of many ideas. It makes use of critical thinking, open mindedness and the desire to explore new discoveries from any source. It involves laying out objectives systematically, evaluation of alternative course of action and selection of the best action plan.

It prevents the management from bias by their personal interests in a given issue that physicians are handling. This process is difficult since it is time consuming to come up with a solution. This may cause the managerial team not to exhaust all the merits and demerits of the proposed solutions thus, the best alternative is implemented.

Creative decision-making process involves a series of processes. The first step is lying out of goals and objectives. This presents a focus on the expected outcome to the managerial team. The institution secretary makes the records in the minutes of the meeting. The decision makers then gather data through collection methods such as questionnaires, observation and sampling.

This involves using supervisors and departmental heads to issue out the questionnaires or observes the employees, depending on the preferred data collection method chosen. The third step involves bringing the collected data together. Solutions emanate from the data to increase the scope from which to choose. An analysis of each solution and the merits and demerits of each follows.

In the next step, the managers choose the solution that has the most merits and lay off those that have more demerits than merits. The management thus makes a decision follow the best alternative. An action takes place through implementing the chosen solution into the problem.

It involves communication of the procedures to follow to the members of staff, directions and guidelines. The management then observes the effect of implementing the chosen solution through demanding of reports from the members of staff (Cummings, 2009).

Creative decision-making involves the use of several methods to arrive at the solution. The consensus method uses group work to project the most preferred solution to an organizational problem. It is the best fit for use by institutions and organizations. The systematic method involves the detailed evaluation of all possible action plans one at a time to arrive at the best.

The individualistic method of decision-making occurs when only an individual comes up with the solution. The limited procrastination method uses time to sharpen its facts. The decision occurs after a long time has expired, so that all facts pop out and the situation analyzed for effective decision-making.

The intuitive method of making decisions occurs immediately after problem identification. Professions such as physicians use it in development of an immediate and urgent solution.

The health institution environment does not have a highly competitive market for being a private firm. The private firm values its customers by providing the best services to them in exchange of high profit returns. This ensures that there is a stable environment to the market forces from competitors and suppliers. The customers’ needs and availability of resources to cater for the will influence the organization structure.

The best structure to the health institution would be formal, since flexibility limits occur through the physician’s responsibility to the client. A more horizontal organization design or matrix structure would be useful according to the health institutional business strategy. This is because the staff in the health center divides according to the skills they have to tackle their clients.

References

Cummings, T. (2009). Organization Development and Change. London: Routledge.

Hellriegel, D., & Slocum, J. W. (2007). Organizational behavior. New York: Cengage Learning.

Learmonth M. (2006). Evidence-Based Management: The very idea. Journal of Public Administration. 84 (2), 245- 266.

Ury, W. & Fisher, R. (1998). Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. New York: Penguin Books.

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