At a healthcare technology company, the head of engineering, Karim, and the head of sales, Ellen, have stopped speaking except in meetings. It began with an email. Ellen wrote to a customer promising a feature by June, copying Karim. Karim replied to all: “This was never agreed with engineering.” Ellen read the reply as an attempt to humiliate her in front of a customer. Karim had read her promise as a deliberate attempt to force his hand.
Since then, each has collected evidence. Karim notes every time sales commits to something unscheduled. Ellen notes every time engineering says no. Each tells their team what the other is like. The teams have taken sides. A product launch slips by five weeks because neither department will raise problems with the other until the weekly meeting. The chief executive, who dislikes confrontation, has told them both to “sort it out like adults”. Each is waiting for the other to apologise, and each has a file.
Conflict at work is normal and, in some forms, useful. Teams that never disagree are usually teams in which people have stopped saying what they think. But conflict that turns personal consumes extraordinary amounts of time and attention. One frequently cited survey, commissioned by the publisher of a well-known conflict assessment, estimated that employees spend close to three hours a week dealing with conflict.
Managers and HR are regularly asked to deal with disputes like the one above, and they tend to approach them as arguments about facts: who said what, who is right. The psychology suggests that the facts are seldom the problem. The problem is the story each person has built about the other’s motives.
Conflict begins with a story.
People explain others’ behaviour by character and their own by circumstances, then act on the assumption.
Task disagreement can help; personal friction never does.
The task kind turns personal quickly when trust is low.
Mediate interests, not positions.
Hear each side alone, have each summarise the other, find what each needs and agree specific behaviour.
How does a disagreement become a conflict?
Through attribution. When someone does something that harms or irritates us, we explain it, immediately and automatically. The explanation we choose decides what happens next.
The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to explain other people’s behaviour by their character or intentions while underestimating the influence of their situation. We explain our own behaviour the other way round, pointing to circumstances. The asymmetry is among the most robust findings in social psychology, though its strength varies between cultures.
Ellen made a promise to a customer. Karim’s explanation: she is trying to bounce engineering into a deadline. An alternative: the customer was about to sign with a competitor, she thought June was plausible from an earlier roadmap, and she copied Karim so that he would know.
Karim replied to all. Ellen’s explanation: he wanted to embarrass her. An alternative: he panicked about a commitment he could not meet and hit reply without thinking about the recipient list.
Neither checked. Each responded to an assumed intention, and the response then gave the other person real grounds for offence.
We experience our own view of events as simply the way things are. People who see it differently must therefore be uninformed, irrational or acting in bad faith. Each party in a conflict is sincerely convinced of being the reasonable one.
Once the story is in place, confirmation bias sustains it. Karim notices each unscheduled promise and overlooks the times Ellen checks first. The files grow.
Why does email make it worse?
Because writing removes tone, expression and the chance of immediate repair. Research by Kristin Byron on emotion in email found that recipients tend to read neutral messages as more negative than the sender intended and positive ones as more neutral. A brief reply written in a hurry is taken as cold or hostile.
The medium also makes escalation easy. A sharp reply can be written in seconds, sent to an audience and kept for ever. The copy line becomes a weapon. Many workplace conflicts can be traced to a single message read in the worst possible light.
A simple rule saves a great deal of trouble: if an email makes you angry, do not answer it by email. Walk over or pick up the phone and ask what was meant.
Is conflict always harmful?
Researchers distinguish kinds of conflict, and the distinction has practical value.
| Type | What it is about | Typical effect |
|---|---|---|
| Task conflict | The content of the work: what to do, which option is better | Can improve decisions when moderate and when the team feels safe |
| Process conflict | How to do the work: who does what, deadlines, resources | Generally harmful; often becomes personal |
| Relationship conflict | Personal friction: dislike, perceived disrespect, clashing values | Consistently harmful to performance and satisfaction |
The distinction was established by Karen Jehn in the 1990s, and the early view was that task conflict is good and relationship conflict bad. Later evidence complicated this.
An influential meta-analysis found that both task and relationship conflict were negatively related to team performance and member satisfaction on average. A larger later meta-analysis found that relationship and process conflict were reliably harmful, while task conflict was not necessarily so, and could be neutral or beneficial under certain conditions, notably when it was not accompanied by relationship conflict.
The difficulty is that task conflict readily turns into relationship conflict. A disagreement about a deadline becomes “she doesn’t respect my team”. What allows a group to argue about the work without it becoming personal is trust and the climate described in our guide to psychological safety. Without that, even reasonable disagreement is experienced as attack. The dispute between Karim and Ellen started as a task conflict over a delivery date. Within a day it was a relationship conflict.
How do people differ in handling conflict?
The best-known framework is the Thomas-Kilmann model, which describes five styles along two dimensions: how much a person asserts their own concerns and how much they cooperate with the other’s.
| Style | Assertive? | Cooperative? | Useful when | Costly when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Competing | High | Low | Quick decision needed; a principle is at stake | Used habitually; relationships matter |
| Accommodating | Low | High | The issue matters more to the other person | Resentment builds; your needs are never met |
| Avoiding | Low | Low | Trivial issue; tempers need to cool | Important issues are left to fester |
| Compromising | Medium | Medium | Time is short; a fair split is acceptable | A better solution existed and was missed |
| Collaborating | High | High | Both sets of concerns are important | The issue does not justify the time |
No single style is correct. Each suits some situations. Problems arise when someone uses one style for everything, or when two habitual styles collide. Two competitors, like Karim and Ellen, escalate. A competitor and an avoider produce a pattern in which one presses and the other withdraws, each provoking more of the other’s behaviour. A chief executive whose style is avoidance leaves a vacuum.
What should a manager do when two people are in conflict?
Step in earlier than feels comfortable. “Sort it out like adults” is avoidance presented as respect. By the time a conflict is visible to a manager, the parties have usually already tried and failed, and have moved to building cases and recruiting allies.
Start by talking to each person separately. The aims are to understand their account, let them feel heard and judge whether a joint conversation is feasible. Listen for what they want, what they fear and what they assume about the other.
Set ground rules. One person speaks at a time. Describe your own experience and do not characterise the other. The purpose is to work together in future, not to rule on the past.
Have each describe the effect on them. Using “I” statements: “When I saw the reply-all, I felt undermined in front of a customer.”
Ask each to summarise the other. “Karim, what did you hear Ellen say?” This is uncomfortable and powerful. For most parties it is the first time they have paid attention to the other’s account.
Uncover intentions. “Ellen, what were you trying to do when you wrote to the customer?” The gap between the intention assumed and the real one is usually where the conflict gives way.
Move from positions to interests. This distinction, from Roger Fisher and William Ury’s Getting to Yes, is central. A position is what someone demands. An interest is why they want it. Karim’s position is “no commitments without sign-off”. His interest is not being held responsible for dates he cannot meet. Ellen’s position is “I need flexibility with customers”. Her interest is not losing deals while waiting for an answer. The positions conflict. The interests can both be met, for instance by a 24-hour turnaround on date requests and a shared view of the roadmap.
Agree specific behaviour. Good intentions are not enough. Who will do what, starting when? And when will you all review it?
When is mediation not appropriate?
When the matter is not a dispute between equals.
- Bullying, harassment or discrimination. These are allegations of misconduct. They need investigation under the proper procedure. Asking a person to mediate with someone who has harassed them places an unfair burden on them and may breach legal duties.
- A significant power imbalance. A junior employee may be unable to speak freely to a senior one.
- Serious misconduct. Dishonesty, threats or breaches of policy belong in the disciplinary process described in workplace discipline psychology.
- One party unwilling. Mediation is voluntary. It cannot be imposed.
Where an internal manager is too close, or the parties are senior, a trained mediator from HR or outside is worth the cost. Our workplace investigations guide covers the formal route.
Do not push people toward “talking it through” when what they are describing is mistreatment. Listen carefully in the individual meetings for anything that sounds like harassment or discrimination, and if you hear it, stop the mediation and follow the formal process.
How do you reduce conflict in the first place?
Much conflict is structural. People clash where their goals have been set against each other, where roles overlap or where resources are scarce.
- Check the incentives. If sales is paid on bookings and engineering is measured on delivery dates, the organisation has built in the conflict between Karim and Ellen. Shared goals reduce it. See bonus psychology on what incentives do to cooperation.
- Clarify roles and decision rights. Who may commit to a date? Ambiguity invites territorial disputes.
- Establish how to disagree. Teams that agree in advance how they will handle disagreement, including raising it directly and early, have fewer feuds.
- Teach the attribution habit. The most useful single practice is to ask, before reacting, “what else might explain this?” and then to check.
- Deal with it early. A two-day-old misunderstanding takes ten minutes to clear up. A two-month-old feud takes weeks.
Teach your team one sentence and use it yourself: “When you did X, the story I told myself was Y. Is that right?” It separates the observation from the interpretation, admits that the interpretation may be mistaken and invites correction. Most conflicts would not survive that sentence being used in the first hour.
The chief executive finally asked the head of people to mediate. In the joint session, Ellen learned that Karim had replied to all by mistake and had been too proud to say so. Karim learned that Ellen had based the June date on a roadmap slide his own team had presented in January. They agreed on a one-day turnaround for date requests and a shared roadmap updated weekly. It took two hours. The launch delay that preceded it had cost the company a quarter’s revenue on that product.
Frequently asked questions
What causes most workplace conflict?
Misread intentions are the most common trigger: one person attributes another’s action to bad character or hostile motives without checking. Underlying causes include competing goals, unclear roles, scarce resources and differences in communication style.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
It is the tendency to explain other people’s behaviour by their personality or intentions while explaining our own by the situation. In conflicts it leads each party to see the other as deliberately difficult.
What are the five conflict management styles?
The Thomas-Kilmann model identifies competing, accommodating, avoiding, compromising and collaborating. Each is appropriate in some situations. Difficulties arise when a person relies on one style regardless of circumstances.
When should a manager intervene in a conflict between employees?
When the conflict affects work or others in the team, when the parties have not resolved it themselves within a short time, or immediately if there is any suggestion of bullying, harassment or discrimination, which requires a formal process.