Negotiation as relationship-building in healthcare organizations: a case study exercise

A key skill needed by healthcare managers is an ability to simultaneously maintain and enhance relationships with multiple stakeholders, most notably clinical professionals, through the process of decision-making and negotiation. Additionally, healthcare managers need to be able to actively integrate various components of functional areas into their decision-making process. This article presents two exercises that serve the following purposes: (1) it can help raise students' awareness of the complexity involved in decision-making and negotiating, (2) it can create an understanding that decision-making and negotiations are embedded in a larger context involving multiple relationships between parties, and (3) it can be used as a means to measure the student's integrative ability within the traditional curriculum of an MHA program.