Abstracts Communications and the Arts

Organizational Conflict: role, responsibilities and skills of the Nurse Manager

by GIANLUCA VALENTINI

When it comes to managing healthcare personnel, the Nurse Manager has a prominent role: among the various duties that he needs to fulfill, he also has to communicate efficiently. The aim of this thesis is to show that communication, as a means of conveying information by different actors with their own channels and types, sometimes can be distorted and these very distortions can compromise the delicate balance among nurses. Such distortions, if not promptly foreseen, analysed and faced, may lead to conflict. For these reasons, Managers are in charge of piloting all streams of information so as to prevent and avoid conflict, and ultimately, improve health care communication as a whole. The aim of this work is to focus on Organizational Conflict in Health Care, so as to find possible solutions and improvement actions and to master a means of creating and keeping a peaceful, nurturing, and as a consequence, more productive work environment. This thesis covers the following topics: • communication and its implications in nursing healthcare; • the concept of organizational conflict; • strategies of managing organizational conflict. The methodological path addressed in this work is a bibliographic research in health and communication fields, combined with the experiences accumulated tanks to career and internship. The result will be a descriptive display of the various communication styles to be adopted depending on the type of organizational conflict identified.