Working in Collaborative Practice: Conflict Management Styles in Dental Professionals

OBJECTIVE: Conflicts are inevitable in all human interactions. Clinicians at workplaces experience both personal and professional conflicts. Dental clinicians engage in multidisciplinary teamwork during their practice, which exposes them to a variety of conflicting situations. The study aimed to explore the trend of different conflict management styles practiced by dentists while working in collaborative practices. METHODOLOGY: The study was cross sectional descriptive survey in which 146 dental clinicians from multiple institutions participated with voluntary and informed consent. Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II (ROCI-II) tool was used to collect data against the use of conflict management styles namely, Collaborating, Accommodating, Competing, Avoiding and Compromising. The obtained data were analyzed through SPSS 25.0. The data were categorized according to the 5 styles of conflict management and association with the variables of gender, position in organization, and type of organization was seen for each conflict management style. RESULTS: The study revealed that 54.8% of participants had collaborating style followed by avoiding style (18.5%) whereas, competing style was least predominant (3.4%). Both genders had collaborating style as most predominant style. No strong difference was seen in the frequency of conflict management styles between the dentists belonging to private and public institutions. Every cadre of clinicians was more inclined towards "collaborating" and "avoiding" conflict management style. Besides these two styles, house officers and demonstrators were more "accommodating" while residents and assistant professors were more "compromising". CONCLUSION: Dental clinicians in the present study mostly used collaborative style for conflict management in their practices.The awareness of conflict management styles is important so that the use of positive conflict management styles could be maximized. The use of effective conflict management styles should be taught to young dentists in order to equip them with necessary tools for everyday collaborations at clinical workplaces. KEYWORDS: Conflict, Conflict management, dentists, workplace