Case Study:
As the APRN, you are the leader on a quality improvement project team for your practice setting. The members of your team are in serious conflict. They have
split into two camps. The last team meeting was a disaster with four members of the team sitting on one side of the table and the other four on the other
side. You could feel the tension in the air. You ended the meeting after only 30 minutes as it was apparent nothing was getting resolved at that time. You
scheduled another meeting for the following Wednesday as you needed time to prepare your strategy.
You have talked with each member of the team individually to understand what was going on from their perspective. From these discussions you learned the
following:
Not all team members felt that they were heard in meetings and true consensus had not been reached in the past. Rather, team members felt that they were
“pushed” into coming to an agreement on the leadership’s solutions to past problems that arose on the project.
During a few brainstorming sessions, team members felt that ideas were discarded in favor of ideas that were favored by the practice leadership and no real
brainstorming took place.
Team members felt that some other members of the team were getting away with not completing tasks on time or of poor quality and that was impacting
the workload of everyone else.
Early on in the project the team never worked through how the conflict would be managed when it did arise on the project. One team member recently shared
with you that more senior team clinical staff were strongly encouraging them to stop attending the project team meetings. This is your first time leading a
project team and you are feeling very frustrated and spending more time on this conflict than you had planned.
Based on the information provided above, discuss the following:
Evaluate the problem. What are the key issues?
How would you handle this situation? Specifically, how would you demonstrate leadership to resolve this conflict?
Which leadership style would you follow as you try to move this team forward?
Using the five leadership characteristics: character, commitment, connectedness, compassion, and confidence (Yoder-Wise, 2006, Chapter 7; pdf posted in
Module 3) as a guide, discuss which these characteristics of a leader you would employ in this situation.
