General Hospital

Conflict Resolution at General Hospital

Brittny Roseberry

Professor: Thomas Schaefer

Leadership and Organizational Behavior

May 28, 2011

Discuss the conflict that is occurring at General Hospital.

The conflict which is defined as “one party thinks that their ideas or goals are being opposed by another party negatively affecting that party” (Hellriegel/Slocum, 2011). The two people in opposition at General Hospital are the CEO Mike Hammer and Director of Medicine Dr. Mark Williams. The General hospital was in a situation in which it was losing money and patients to the Medical Center nearby. The Medical Center had undergone a series of renovations and gained some state of the art equipment, which lead to the decline of patients in the General Hospital. Since the patients declined then the hospital had to let go some of the areas that were not strong and focus on the areas that were capable of being enhanced and profitable. One of the ideas that Mr. Hammer came up with was cutting physician driven cost. Mr. Hammer had tried numerous attempts to get Dr. Williams to direct his staff of physicians become “cost sensitive” (Hellriegel/Slocum, 2011). However many of these attempts failed because Dr. Williams opposed to the idea making the statement “adhering to the plan would make it difficult to attract and keep talented physicians” (Hellriegel/Slocum, 2011). Mr. Hammer was getting frustrated so he opted to deal with the controlled cost situation on a case-by-case basis. Mr. Hammer had also just hired a COO named Marge Harding who was in charge of the operations of the hospital. Mr. Hammer delegated Marge to get the situation in control, which she happily does because of her own personal goals that she wants to achieve. The type of conflict is intergroup conflict, which defined as oppositions, disagreements, and disputes between groups or team members (Hellriegel/Slocum, 2011). The groups are the physician, and the board of trustees versus management. The...