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Essay on Lincoln Hospital

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Abstract
This case study illustrates the crisis faced by the president of Lincoln Hospital, a for-profit hospital that had several hundred beds to fill. A number of issues are occurring at the hospital impacting the ability of the hospital to successfully perform the planned surgeries without incurring significant issues. These issues include high turnover, scheduling issues, service delays, and a divided staff. Worst of all, however, the doctors and nurses are at war. Specifically, Don, the new chief of surgery, is at war with Mary, the veteran OR director. Don and the other surgeons want Mary fired from her job but the president is unwilling to remove Mary from her position. The president is faced with a difficult choice. Therefore, he …show more content…

He should have talked with either Mary or Don prior to establishing the contract with Lincoln Hospital’s President. The contracting process should include all parties, which would be inclusive of Mary and Don. This ensures they all have an input into establishing expectations for the process in terms of the desired outcomes, establish ground rules that all parties could abide by, and agree upon the time and resources that would be devoted to completing the goals within the given constraints.
The OD practitioner should not have negotiated a psychological contract with Lincoln’s president. “Regardless of the level of formality, all OD processes require some form of explicit contracting that result in either a verbal or written agreement” (Cummings 79). There was no agreement regarding the time to resolve the issues, or the acceptable solutions versus unacceptable solutions, other than the solution must include ongoing employment for both Mary and Don.
Third-Party Intervention Effectiveness
The third-party intervention was an appropriate intervention in this case. The process of writing things down was helpful as it reduced the friction between the two parties. Also, the questions required specific answers concerning behaviors, not subjective generalizations about personalities. By requiring that Mary and Don explain the responses to the questions orally to the third party, the consultant was able to avoid

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