The Impacts of Resident-Centered Care on Conflicts in Nursing Homes

Abstract

As the value in changing work practices has been recognized along with a shift to the new paradigm of customer-patients, many health care delivery organizations have been engaged in organizational initiatives to improve care quality. In this paper, we focus on resident-centered care (RCC) practices in nursing homes and examine how organizational practices affect organizational conflicts among employees and conflicts with resident families. In results, we found positive evidence that resident-centered care practices are negatively related to task conflicts among employees and that to the extent to which nursing home organizations implement RCC practices, employees experience less conflict with residents’ families over personal and resident care issues. Implications of these results are provided for future research on high performance work systems (HPWS) and conflict as well as for practice.