Ryan Fehr

Individual, interpersonal, and organisational factors of healthcare conflict: A scoping review

ABSTRACT Unresolved conflicts among healthcare professionals can lead to difficult patient care consequences. This scoping review examines the current healthcare literature that reported sources and consequences of conflict associated with individual, interpersonal, and organisational factors. We identified 99 articles published between 2001 and 2015 from PubMed, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and Excerpta Medical Database. Most reviewed studies relied on healthcare professionals’ perceptions and beliefs associated with conflict sources and consequences, with few studies reporting behavioural or organisational change outcomes. Individual conflict sources included personal traits, such as self-focus, self-esteem, or worldview, as well as individuals’ conflict management styles. These conflicts posed threats to one’s physical, mental, and emotional health and to one’s ability to perform at work. Interpersonal dynamics were hampered by colleagues’ uncivil behaviours, such as low degree of support, to more destructive behaviours including bullying or humiliation. Perceptions of disrespectful working environment and weakened team collaboration were the main interpersonal conflict consequences. Organisational conflict sources included ambiguity in professional roles, scope of practice, reporting structure, or workflows, negatively affecting healthcare professionals’ job satisfactions and intent to stay. Future inquiries into healthcare conflict research may target the following: shifting from research involving single professions to multiple professions; dissemination of studies via journals that promote interprofessional research; inquiries into the roles of unconscious or implicit bias, or psychological capital (i.e., resilience) in healthcare conflict; and diversification of data sources to include hospital or clinic data with implications for conflict sources.

The Unburdening Effects of Forgiveness: Effects on Slant Perception and Jumping Height

Research shows that in the aftermath of conflict, forgiveness improves victims’ well-being and the victim–offender relationship. Building on the research on embodied perception and economy of action, we demonstrate that forgiveness also has implications for victims’ perceptions and behavior in the physical domain. Metaphorically, unforgiveness is a burden that can be lightened by forgiveness; we show that people induced to feel forgiveness perceive hills to be less steep (Study 1) and jump higher in an ostensible fitness test (Study 2) than people who are induced to feel unforgiveness. These findings suggest that forgiveness may lighten the physical burden of unforgiveness, providing evidence that forgiveness can help victims overcome the negative effects of conflict.

Is retirement always stressful? The potential impact of creativity.

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How Do Leaders React When Treated Unfairly? Leader Narcissism and Self-Interested Behavior in Response to Unfair Treatment.

In this article we employ a trait activation framework to examine how unfairness perceptions influence narcissistic leaders’ self-interested behavior, and the downstream implications of these effects for employees’ pro-social and voice behaviors. Specifically, we propose that narcissistic leaders are particularly likely to engage in self-interested behavior when they perceive that their organizations treat them unfairly, and that this self-interested behavior in turn decreases followers’ pro-social behavior and voice. Data from a multisource, time-lagged survey of 211 team leaders and 1,205 subordinates provided support for the hypothesized model. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Power as an emotional liability: Implications for perceived authenticity and trust after a transgression

People may express a variety of emotions after committing a transgression. Through 6 empirical studies and a meta-analysis, we investigate how the perceived authenticity of such emotional displays and resulting levels of trust are shaped by the transgressor’s power. Past findings suggest that individuals with power tend to be more authentic because they have more freedom to act on the basis of their own personal inclinations. Yet, our findings reveal that (a) a transgressor’s display of emotion is perceived to be less authentic when that party’s power is high rather than low; (b) this perception of emotional authenticity, in turn, directly influences (and mediates) the level of trust in that party; and (c) perceivers ultimately exert less effort when asked to make a case for leniency toward high rather than low-power transgressors. This tendency to discount the emotional authenticity of the powerful was found to arise from power increasing the transgressor’s perceived level of emotional control and strategic motivation, rather than a host of alternative mechanisms. These results were also found across different types of emotions (sadness, anger, fear, happiness, and neutral), expressive modalities, operationalizations of the transgression, and participant populations. Altogether, our findings demonstrate that besides the wealth of benefits power can afford, it also comes with a notable downside. The findings, furthermore, extend past research on perceived emotional authenticity, which has focused on how and when specific emotions are expressed, by revealing how this perception can depend on considerations that have nothing to do with the expression itself.