Conflict management style, perceived organizational support and occupational stress in emergency department nurses

Occupational Stress (OS) produces negative consequences that affect the nurse, the organization and the patient. Factors in the work environment that effect worker outcomes like occupational stress include perceived organizational support and conflict management style. The purpose of this non-experimental study was to examine the conflict management style emergency department (ED) nurses use to resolve conflict and how conflict management style and perceived organizational support affects their experience of stress. Using a correlational design, this study examined factors such as perceived organizational support, and conflict management style and their relationship to OS in a sample of 222 ED staff nurses. The Expanded Nurse Stress Scale, the Survey of Perceived Organizational Support and the Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II were used to measure these variables. Significant relationships were found between perceived organizational support and OS (r=-.292, p=.000) and avoidant conflict management style and OS (r =.300, p = .000). No significant relationships were found between integrating, dominating, and obliging dimensions of conflict management styles and OS. Regression analysis demonstrated that perceived organizational support and avoidant conflict management style were independently related to OS (β=-.262, p=.003, β=. 209, p=.018). Perceived organizational support and avoidant conflict management style explained 15% of the variance in OS. However, perceived organizational support did not moderate any of the hypothesized relationships between the dimensions of conflict management style and OS. Ancillary analysis revealed that perceived organizational support and avoidant conflict management style were significantly related to several dimensions of stress including the problems with supervisors dimension of stress (r=.433, p.01) and both independently predicted stress from problems with supervisors while controlling for the effect of each other (β=.15, p=.01, β=.47, p=.01). These findings suggest that the nurse's approach to resolving conflict with her supervisor(s) does indeed correlate with her experience of stress. Perceived organizational support and avoidant conflict management style are predictors of OS and assessment of the ED staff nurse's conflict management style and coaching in constructive conflict resolution may be helpful in the their experience of OS.Ph. D.Includes abstractVitaIncludes bibliographical referencesby Mary L. Johanse