ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the areas of health care worker conflict, social support, and the relationships among these variables and two key organizational outcomes: employee burnout and employee turnover/retention in health care organizations. It also focuses on the conditions that often lead to conflict within health care organizations, dealing with the interrelationships among conflict, stress, social support, and burnout/retention among health care workers. The chapter then discusses two broad approaches to conflict interventions: communication competence approaches targeting individual health care workers, and the structurational divergence theory approach. It further explores the strengths and limitations of both the individual competence and the structurational divergence approaches in terms of designing interventions that target health care worker conflict, social support, burnout, and turnover issues. It is important for health communication researchers to work at improving one's understanding of conflict, social support, burnout and turnover, and other important variables within this context in the future.
