Attributional analysis of interprofessional role conflict

Interprofessional role conflict is often a source of job dissatisfaction for health professionals. Attributional analysis provides a methodology to better understand the health care provider's perceptions of the causes of interprofessional conflict and the influence of these causal perceptions on future behavior. This paper reports a study in which 86 physical therapists reported the attributions (perceived causes) they held for situations in which they had compromised (failure) and other instances in which they had supported (success) their best professional judgement following incidents of interprofessional conflict with physicians. Comparison of reported incidents showed that there were significant differences in subject perceptions of the nature of the causes and their future expectations following success and following failure. Therapists tended to ascribe their successes to internal, stable and controllable causes, such as their personality, effort, assertiveness or the strategies they used and held high expectations for future success. Following failure, therapists ascribed the causes of their failures to more external and uncontrollable causes such as influence of the supervisor or the receptivity of the physician. Therapist causal ascriptions for failure to external and uncontrollable sources strongly correlated with high future expectations of failure. Patterns of causal thinking following incidents of interprofessional conflict clearly influence one's future expectations to avoid, withdraw or to seek a productive resolution to role conflict.