Negative Workplace Relationships in Healthcare Companies
Studies show high levels of unhappiness and physical stress among workers in the healthcare industry. As a result, there has been a growing need for managers and executives to lower employee turnover and foster a healthier work environment with increased staff morale. In his blog post, ‘Healthcare Companies Can Combat a Negative Workplace,’ Paul White attributes the stress experienced by healthcare workers to poor workplace communication and relationships. Moreover, he proposes different methods which he believes can be applied on a day-to-day basis to resolve these problems.
White encourages employees to do a self-assessment to identify their negative interactions in the workplace. Signs of toxic behavior among workers are observed in workers’ grudges towards one another, incessant complaints, bad attitudes, and uncooperativeness. Though these acts are sometimes inadvertent, workers should avoid them; instead, White argues, workers should actively support each other through positive messages. In doing so, they can validate themselves too and thereby reinforce their belief that they can contribute to their community.
The stress-related, workplace problems in health companies today relate to the topics of positive and negative relationships and triadic closure. First, we can make an assumption that the three nodes – A, B, and C – represent three workers in a healthcare company. If there are underlying tensions between all three workers (e.g. grudges due to previous occurrences), nodes, A, B, C may likely have negative edges connecting each other, all of which represent negative relationships. In this instance, there is instability in this configuration of nodes, as all three workers have mutual enemies.
Another example of a configuration reflects the strained workplace relationships White discusses: worker A is friends with colleague B and C, although worker B and C dislike each other (thus, edges AB and AC are positive, with edge BC negative). Once again, there is a psychological pressure exerted on the three nodes, where worker A potentially either tries to make colleague B and C cooperate with each other, or sides with only one of the two colleagues. These two configurations of nodes exemplify structural imbalances which violate the structural balance property and perhaps reflect the negative relationships between workers that are causing lower staff morale and other organizational issues in the healthcare industry.
Lastly, White suggests that healthcare workers build stronger ties with each other. With stronger ties, the likelihood of triadic closure occurring increases. Mutual trust can be developed and within its social network, each node representing a healthcare employee could have a higher clustering coefficient – the probability of two nodes, specifically two arbitrarily chosen friends of a worker, being connected by an edge.