A dispute in a team does not necessarily mean that collaboration has failed. It often exposes concerns, uncertainty or different assumptions that had previously remained hidden. A manager who focuses only on who is right can make the conflict even more entrenched. It is more useful to find out what people believe is under threat and how their reactions affect the behavior of others.
Conflict in companies is often treated as a fault: identify the cause, determine responsibility and restore normal operations as quickly as possible. This approach works for technical problems, but in interpersonal disputes it can miss a substantial part of what is happening. INSEAD points out that workplace conflict is not made up only of differing arguments. Concerns, uncertainty, individual experience and the defensive reactions of the whole team also enter into the interaction.
Uncertainty around a project, reorganization or failure can, for example, trigger fear for one’s own position. A person may then interpret a colleague’s critical question not as an attempt to clarify the problem but as an attack on their expertise. They react defensively, the other side responds in the same way, and the dispute becomes locked in. The more participants focus on the individual arguments, the less they see the mechanism producing their reactions.
A manager therefore needs to separate three levels. The first is the substantive problem itself. The second consists of the assumptions through which people interpret the situation. The third consists of concerns that are not stated openly. INSEAD recommends asking, for example, why a particular person or behavior irritates us so much and whether we are assigning a meaning to their actions that is not actually there.
The hardest issue is often to open a topic everyone knows about but nobody wants to discuss. A new project may promise higher productivity while at the same time implying fewer jobs. If leadership discusses only the schedule and budget while employees are thinking about possible layoffs, two different meetings are effectively taking place at the same time.
In practice, it is therefore not enough to call a meeting after a conflict and ask, “what happened?” You also need to find out how individual people perceived the situation, what they believed was threatened and how they responded to that concern. The aim is not a therapeutic analysis of the team but to remove mistaken interpretations that have begun to influence work decisions.
It is also useful to prevent the conflict from becoming personalized immediately. Instead of saying, “Peter is blocking the project,” the question can be reframed as, “What information or concern is causing us to see this step differently?” This change does not remove accountability, but it gives the team room to work with the cause rather than only the visible symptom.
A resilient team is therefore not a team without conflict. It is a team that can open up disagreement before a substantive difference turns into a defense of one’s own position or a personal dispute.
KEY TERMS
- Team anxiety: Shared uncertainty or concern that affects the behavior of several team members at the same time.
- Defensive reaction: An automatic response that protects one’s own position or self-image and can block a substantive discussion.
- Relational resilience: A team’s ability to process tension and disagreement without long-term damage to collaboration.
- Hidden issue: An important topic that participants know about but, for various reasons, do not name openly.