Managing Workplace Ostracism through Resilience in Healthcare Sector: A Qualitative Study

Purpose: The main purpose of the present study is to understand the negative consequences of workplace ostracism in the form of adverse event encountered by healthcare practitioners. The second major and unique aim was to establish resilience as a moderator which buffers the impact of workplace ostracism. Design/Methodology/Approach: The approach used in this study is phenomenography, based on non-dualistic ontological perspective which investigates an individual's experiences of a phenomenon and also emphasize on understanding the different ways in which a phenomenon can be experienced and realised. The phenomenographic approach helped us to prepare a varied set of categories of description which is derived from the doctor's perception and understanding about the phenomenon of ostracism at their workplace.A total of 50 currently practicing medical doctors were approached at their work place for the data collection using purposive sampling technique. The respondents i.e. doctors were selected by asking some screening questions. However, only 18 of them were found to be qualified after the screening for a meaningful contribution to our study. Further, the data collected from these 18 respondent doctors through a semi-structured interview process which was later analyzed by employing a seven-stage analysis & interpretation process. Findings: We found that workplace ostracism in the form of silent harassment has a strong negative impact on work related behaviors in context to healthcare sector. The employees who are being ostracized at work seems to be less engaged and energized at work and also the stress among them is high; this relationship can be well explained in the light of Conservation of Resources Theory. Also it is found that decreased engagement and increased stress further aggravates the intention to quit the job among healthcare employee. This relationship can be justified with the help of social exchange theory which suggests that behaviour of an individual is reciprocated. Moreover, this study also highlight that not all doctors who are ignored or avoided by their peers lose their well-being. In fact they bounce back with resilience. This study is unique as it also examines the role of resilience as a moderator which helps in reducing the deleterious impact of workplace ostracism on work related behaviours. The respondent doctors revealed that despite the fact that their social relations are a bit disturbed when they are ostracized, they believe that these situations will not remain same. Further, such events do not de-motivate them to provide effective medical services to their patients. Further, it is confirmed that the days on which level of resilience is low among healthcare practitioner, this makes them involve in maximizing the negative effects of ostracism at work. Originality/Value: The present study is unique as it explores different outcomes of adverse event in the form of workplace ostracism which is the need of the hour. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study where we try to explore resilience as a moderator which affects the interplay of constructs like workplace ostracism, job engagement and workplace stress.