Conflict resolution techniques applied to interprofessional collaborative practice.

Hochschild (1983) described the term “emotional labor” as handling of feelings “in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces in others the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place”. “Emotional dissonance” or “surface acting” (Hochschild 1983) has been defined as to display positive (or negative) emotions that “do not correspond to what is felt in the situation” (Zapf & Holz 2006; Wharton 2009), and “inauthenticity” has been understood as a disjuncture between who one is expected to be at work and the person’s real self (Bulan et al. 1997; Erickson & Ritter 2001; Wharton 2009). Both of them tend to produce negative psychological effects like burn out (Van Dijk & Brown 2006). Although the concept of “emotion work” has been employed to help illuminate doctor–nurse relations (Miller et al. 2008; Wharton 2009), we still have a poor understanding of its broader effects across different interprofessional settings. The main difficulty resides in the implicit assumption that self-emotions can be not only managed, but also promoted in order to influence other’s emotions – a process which has been termed “emotional contagion” (Pugh 2001). However, handling self-emotions and promoting emotions in others are both extremely difficult processes to successfulness. In this editorial, I give some highlights of the contents of a Conflict Prevention Program we offered at a Spanish Private Hospital, applying the Business Conflict Resolution model from the Program of Negotiation (PON) based at the Harvard Law School (Fisher & Shapiro 2005) to healthcare workers involved in interprofessional work. Our goal is to train individuals on how to produce positive emotions on daily one-to-one professional and interprofessional interactions. EMOTIONS ARE PART OF LIFE