Types of Conflicts in Doctors in Private and Public Sector Hospitals

Objective: The present research was conducted to assess whether doctors of private and public sector hospitals would differ in organizational conflict types after controlling gender. Material and Method: The sample comprised of 178 doctors employed in private and public sector hospitals among which 84 were from private hospitals and 94 were from public sector hospitals. Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory – III was used to assess the types of conflicts. Results: Results revealed that the doctors from private sector hospital experienced all types of conflicts more than doctors from public sector hospitals, after controlling for the gender. Further substantive conflict was experienced more than other types of conflicts in both settings. Date of Submission 16-9-2015 Date of Revision Received 17-11-2015 Date of Acceptance for Publication 13-5-2016 Conflict of Interest: None Funding Source: None Khalid S. Institute of Applied Psychology, University of the Punjab Fatima I. Institute of Applied Psychology, University of the Punjab Khan W. Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India Conclusion: Although, type of sector plays a major role in determining level of conflicts in doctors, yet task related conflicts named as substantive conflicts are dominant in both types of settings whether private or public.


Introduction
Whenever people or groups with different point of views have to work together, conflicts arise. 1,24][5][6][7][8] Clash among workers or between workers and administration at work place is known as organizational conflict.Particularly, the administrations cater a widefield in the study of the conflict because in a managerial set up, there is adequate contribution of grading, power, supremacy and combination of individuals which provide vital basis for outbreak of conflict situations. 9he present research studied four types of conflicts among doctors in private and public sector, namely, substantive, affective, masquerading and transforming conflicts.Substantive conflict is academic disagreement to the thoughts and is an important stair to solution of problems.This type of conflict was named as issue conflict, 10 cognitive conflict [11][12][13] and task conflict. 14,15Affective conflict arises when there are emotional issues in the group and when people find faults with each other's' behaviors and expressed emotions. 6his type of conflict has been wellknown as emotional conflict, 16 psychological conflict 17 and relationship conflict. 15The third type of conflict is masquerading conflict that is about the absurdity when asso-

Original Article
ciates have expressive clashes with each other.This conflict appears to be taskrelated superficially but this is truly emotional.Another type of conflict is transforming.In this conflict individuals express task related conflicts as personal conflicts.Thus, originally academic disagreements are hidden behind relational or interpersonal disagreements.Hospital is one of the most significant organization with comparable hierarchy of autonomy like other organizations.Private and public settings mainly differ in terms of their goals, accessibility and ownership.Private hospitals are run by single bodies who mainly aim to benefit those who can afford them while public sector hospitals are run by government and aim to satisfy health related issues of everybody in the country.A study conducted to see the differences in quality of private and public hospitals in low socio economic countries showed that apart from higher cost, private hospitals in these countries are less structured.They require unnecessary testing and treatment, and have more possibilities of complications. 18However, Pakistani studies show that people in general are more satisfied with quality of private hospitals than of public hospitals. 19Therefore, it is expected that differences in two settings may affect the types of conflicts experienced by employees.

Literature Review
Although, number of researches have been conducted highlighting the importance of conflicts for performance and group satisfaction, team efficiency and functioning in different organizational settings, [20][21][22] there is dearth of literature on comparison of conflicts in private and public sector organizations except for one study conducted in Pakistan which revealed different levels of different types of conflicts in private and public banks. 23Some other studies, however, indirectly allude to possible differences in conflicts in two sectors.For example, Ogunjimi, Ajibola, and Akah found that affective conflicts affected the private health workers more than public health ones. 24Further it has also been observed that sector plays more vital role in determining preference on values, conflicts and effectiveness in organization than age, gender, working experience of employee. 25In another study conflicts arising in public sector have been reported to be more overt while occurring in private sector are rarely labeled. 26It has also been depicted in a research that conflicts in private sector arise due to situation than from any public sector issue or administrative rules. 27Since men and women have been observed to differ in their expressiveness of emotions, communication patterns and conflict resolution styles 28 they may be expected to differ in their conflicts.Therefore, current research aimed to see the differences in conflicts of doctors of private and public hospitals controlling for gender.

Hypotheses
Doctors of private and public sector hospitals are likely to differ in organizational conflict types after controlling for gender.There would be relative manifestation of different types of conflicts in private and public sector hospitals.

Material and Methods
Sample consisted of 178 doctors from private (n = 84) and public sector hospitals (n = 94) with 58 men and 26 women from private hospitals and 50 men and 44 women from public hospitals.They were full time employees of the hospitals.Doctors with work experience minimum of two years were included (M = 5.46, 5.11; SD = 5.14, 4.23) for private hospital and public hospitals respectively.Crosssectional research design was used to carry out the research.
In order to assess the four types of conflicts Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory -III 29 was used.Seven items assessed affective conflict, seven items were related to substantive conflict, five items gauged transforming conflict and five items measured masquerading conflict.Each item was to be rated on 7point Likerttype assessment scale, giving the score of 7 to' strongly disagree, and 1 to 'strongly agree'.Scale scores were attained by mean score on each subscale items for each individual.Conceivable scores ranged from 1 to 7 with high score meaning more existence of such sub type of conflict.The Cronbach alphas for the subscales in current study were .81,.84,.82,and .75respectively.The analysis was carried out after data entry through SPSS version 20.0.

Results
MANCOVA was performed to investigate the differences of conflict types in doctors working in private and public sector hospitals controlling for gender.
The investigation revealed that there was significant difference between the doctors of private and public sector hospitals on conflict types [Wilk's Lambda = 0.89, F (4,172) = 5.42, p < .001].
Concerning the conflict types individually, the results depicted significant differences in two types of sectors with all four types of conflicts experienced more in the doctors working in private sector than doctors working in the public sector hospitals.
In order to further investigate relative level of experience of conflict types in private and public sector hospitals separately two repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted.To investigate the differences in conflict types in specifically in private sector hospitals, one way repeated measures ANOVA was performed.
Findings from Table 2 indicate significant differences in conflict types across doctors of private hospitals.
Pair wise comparisons reveal that substantive type of conflict was experienced more than affecting and masquerading while substantive and transforming were at same level in doctors working in private sector hospitals.
To investigate the differences in conflict types in specifically in public sector hospitals, one way repeated measures ANOVA was performed.
Findings from Table 4 indicate significant differences in conflict types in public sector hospital.
Pair wise comparisons reveal that substantive type of conflict was experienced more than affecting and transforming while transforming and masquerading were at same level in doctors working in public sector hospitals.

Discussion
Overall, it was observed that doctors in private sector hospitals had higher level of all types of conflicts than doctors in public sector hospitals.][25][26][27] All the types have been found more experienced in private settings than in public settings.It has been observed that conflict are less prevalent in those environments where roles are well defined and structured, while they are higher in rate in multiple boss circumstances, anxious environment, pervasiveness of radical technology and confused roles. 30It might be that private hospitals in Pakistan are less structured, have more anxious environment than public hospitals due to the conflicts of high profit goal of owner and gen-  18 Reasons for the differences observed in the present study need to be explored in future studies.Further, substantive conflict was experienced more than all other types in both private and public settings.It seems reasonable to understand that at work place, where people come to perform their assigned tasks, employees are less likely to engage in relational conflict and more likely to engage in task related conflict.In private and public settings doctors perform similar roles so nature of dominant conflict is also similar.2][33][34][35] Therefore, people exhibit more of those conflict which are beneficial rather than those which are destructive in nature.According to Berry, the substantive conflict appears to represent all our vigorously wanted activities like rivalries, academic deliberations and discussions 43 .This is somewhat that stimulates, provokes and motivates.This rejuvenates people at determination and constructs extraordinary concerns.

Conclusion and Implication
The results of the study reveal that environment of hospital setting that is primarily determined by the sector, plays an important role in conflicts among doctors.Further, substantive conflict that is constructive in nature is experienced more than other types in both settings.More researches need to be done to clarify the reasons for higher level of conflicts in doctors from private hospitals which will further help the organizational psychologists and counsellors to address the relevant issues and help the doctors to resolve the conflicts.

Table 1 :
Comparing Conflict Types in Doctors of Private and Public Sector (N = 178).

Table 2 :
Repeated Measure ANOVA Comparing Conflict Types in Doctors of Private Hospitals (N = 84).

Table 3 :
Pairwise Comparisons for Conflict Types in Doctors of Private Sector Hospitals (N = 84).

Table 4 :
Repeated Measure ANOVA Comparing Conflict Types in Doctors of Public Hospitals (N=94).

Table 5 :
Pairwise Comparisons for Conflict Types in Doctors of Public Sector Hospitals (N = 94).