Paper Example on Role of Conflict and Ambiguity

Introduction

It is often difficult and challenging when it comes to the provision of services within organizations. To deliver efficient and quality services, leaders and employees have to align their physical, emotional and mental state with the requirements and the demands of the job within institutions (Soltani et al., 2013). Failure to achieve this can cause a significant reduction in performance levels, conflicts at work and errors during the line of duty. Therefore, the paper focuses on role conflict and ambiguity in relations to its application to nursing managers.

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Role Conflict

Role conflict can be defined as incompatible expectancy between the roles of nurse managers and other nurses. The leaders may issue clashing demands concerning instructions on other nurses which can potentially result in role conflict (Ayoubian et al., 2015). For instance, nurse managers can instruct nurses to carry out different roles outside their profession like performing clerical work and housekeeping. The case can result in an adverse scenario where the characters of nurses are not fully appropriately interpreted. Thus, nurses will get stressed over the job leading to job dissatisfaction and possible errors while providing health services to patients.

Role Ambiguity

This refers to a lack of proper communication of information concerning functions played by specific parties in the nursing department and the unknown impact on the job performance. The role ambiguity influences job stress as well as work conflict within the nursing fraternity due to exposure to unfamiliar environments (Dasgupta, 2012). The new environment is contributed because most managers acquire the position after being direct caregivers to patients. This implies that they are not familiar with how the management works and they tend to encounter challenges regarding their new roles while adopting. If existing managers do not make interventions, the role ambiguity can affect performance negatively through job dissatisfaction and stress-related problems (Dasgupta, 2012). Therefore, the nurses undergoing the changeover should be critically guided and informed of what is expected of managers and how to deal with ethical issues faced. Moreover, they must recognize that practicing nursing is their core professional responsibility.

Conclusion

Indeed, the role conflict and ambiguity are critical issues to be addressed in nursing applications. The major factor causing the problems is lack of clear information on the roles to be executed. Thus, both role conflict and ambiguity should be addressed to prevent cases of job dissatisfaction due to stress, low performance, and possible errors while dispatching nursing responsibilities.

References

Ayoubian, A., Fallahdar, H., Hashemi-Dehaghi, Z., Khoshnavay-Foumani, F., & Sheibani-Tehrani, D. (2015). Physical environment, occupational conflict, and ambiguity of roles: Job stressors among nurses. Iranian Journal of Health Sciences, 3(4), 33-39.

Dasgupta, P. (2012). Effect of role ambiguity, conflict and overload in private hospitals' nurses' burnout and mediation through self Efficacy. Journal of Health Management, 14(4), 513-534.

Soltani, I., Hajatpour, S., Khorram, J., & Nejati, M. (2013). Investigating the effect of role conflict and role ambiguity on employees' job stress: Articulating the role of work-family conflict. Management Science Letters, 3(7), 1927-1936.