Conflict Resolution The organization is Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, which is a new hospital. FBCH is a joint military hospital replacing the old Dewitt Hospital in the same location. The hospital is part of the military health system in Washington, DC, an area also served by a wealth of civilian hospitals and complementary medical services. With a focus on innovation and the military market, FBCH plays an important role for the military community in the region, as a provider of health care.

The Hospital is relatively new, and one of the challenges that it faces is to build the organization from the ground up. This means setting out policies for just about everything, building new systems from scratch, and also it means building a new organizational culture. Many staff members have prior experience either at Dewitt or at other military hospital facilities, though some are new staff members or have come in from civilian hospitals. This means that there is a wide mix of people working at FBCH, including those who have as part of their way of doing things the old ways from Dewitt, and some people who are less familiar with the military hospital working environment, and its uniquenesses. For the human resources department, the initial focus was on getting a full complement of staff members and ensuring that they are fully trained. But this meant that other tasks, such as developing conflict resolution mechanisms, were not developed fully. As such, there are a number of different conflict...

There are traditional conflicts such as those between different health care staff groups (physicians, nurses, administrators, for example), and then there are the different organizational cultures at work as well. Further, the Washington DC area is very diverse, and this means that there are staff members from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds on staff. So there are many potential areas for conflict, many different perspectives about organizational conflict, and not necessarily the means to address this.
Part II. There are different types of conflict that can exist within an organization, ranging from simmering, long-run cold conflicts to open, antagonistic hot conflicts. The former type may well be emerging at FBCH already. In brief, this conflict can be characterized as a friction between different groups with respect to the shaping of the organizational culture. There are many fairly conservative people on staff who believe in a strict hierarchical power structure, including military people and older workers who were raised with such managerial power structures. Other employees, including newer workers, younger staff members and those who are not from a military background, value more modern managerial approaches where there is greater empowerment of different employee groups to provide input into the work environment.

The conflict at present will sometimes flare up into open conflict, if briefly,…