ATTRIBUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF INTERPROFESSIONAL ROLE-CONFLICT

Interprofessional role conflict is often a source of job dissatisfacti on for health professionals. Attributional analysis provides a methodo logy to better understand the health care provider's perceptions of th e causes of interprofessional conflict and the influence of these caus al perceptions on future behavior. This paper reports a study in which 86 physical therapists reported the attributions (perceived causes) t hey held for situations in which they had compromised (failure) and ot her instances in which they had supported (success) their best profess ional judgment following incidents of interprofessional conflict with physicians. Comparison of reported incidents showed that there were si gnificant differences in subject perceptions of the nature of the caus es and their future expectations following success and following failu re. Therapists tended to ascribe their successes to internal, stable a nd controllable causes, such as their personality, effort, assertivene ss or the strategies they used and held high expectations for future s uccess. Following failure, therapists ascribed the causes of their fai lures to more external and uncontrollable causes such as influence of the supervisor or the receptivity of the physician. Therapist causal a scriptions for failure to external and uncontrollable sources strongly correlated with high future expectations of failure. Patterns of caus al thinking following incidents of interprofessional conflict clearly influence one's future expectations to avoid, withdraw or to seek a pr oductive resolution to role conflict.