By Oriane Kets de Vries and Alicia Cheak
“Our simultaneous need for closeness and distance is a fundamental reason why people often find it so difficult to work successfully in groups and teams.” – Kets de Vries
Most leaders don’t need to be told that conflict is difficult. They’ve sat in the meetings where the tension was palpable, or perhaps more commonly, in the ones where it wasn’t, and where the real conversation happened later, in smaller rooms, with smaller groups. What’s less often acknowledged is the cost of avoiding it.
This article is an attempt to look at team conflict honestly: where it comes from, what it stirs up in people, and what thoughtful leaders can do about it. It draws on organisational research, psychodynamic thinking, and some practical frameworks that have stood the test of time. The information below won’t resolve the discomfort, but it may help you sit with it more usefully.
Why Conflict Arises
Team conflict rarely erupts without reason, even when it appears to. Research points consistently to a small cluster of conditions that make friction almost inevitable.
The Workplace Peace Institute’s State of Conflict in the Workplace survey (April 2024) offers a useful empirical anchor here. Among the top ten triggers of workplace conflict, 73% of respondents cited lack of trust as the primary driver, closely followed by personality clashes at 72%, and lack of role clarity at 70%. What’s striking about these three is not simply their prevalence but how deeply they interconnect: unclear roles breed competition; competition erodes trust; and eroded trust makes personality differences harder to bridge.
Trust sits at the top of that list for good reason. Kets de Vries (2005) describes it as a precondition for everything that matters in team life: genuine information sharing, honest disagreement, and real commitment. When trust is absent, people protect rather than collaborate. Information is withheld. Feedback is softened into uselessness. The team operates on a kind of managed surface, and the real work happens elsewhere (Lencioni, 2002).
Personality and style differences are, of course, unavoidable in any group of people. The question is whether the team has the relational foundation to navigate them. Without it, differences in working style, communication preference, or pace feel personal rather than structural, because in the absence of trust, they tend to become interpersonal.
Unclear roles and shared resources create competition by default. Role conflict arises when individuals face inconsistent or incompatible demands about how they should behave to fulfil their role properly. Role ambiguity, by contrast, refers to uncertainty about which tasks and responsibilities constitute a role. When roles and ownership are ambiguous, and budgets are tight, people tend to protect what they can.
Structural interdependence without relationship is perhaps the most underappreciated source of friction. Organisations often design in collaboration before they invest in the relationships that make it possible. Kets de Vries (2005) describes the result as silo formation: teams that become closed systems, hard for colleagues to penetrate, and disconnected from mutual accountability. The structure demands cooperation; the relationships, however, haven’t been built to sustain it.
Status and belonging, more than strategy, drive much of what plays out as task disagreement. David Rock’s SCARF model (NeuroLeadership Journal, 2018) identifies five domains (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) that the brain monitors as social threats. When any of them is perceived as under threat, the response is visceral, fast, and not particularly rational. A conversation that looks like a debate about process is often, underneath, a conversation about who is respected.
Unresolved history compounds everything else. Teams carry their past (Kets de Vries, 2005) into every meeting. Small grievances accumulate quietly until something relatively minor triggers what appears to be a disproportionate response.
The Case for Conflict
While conflict can be disconcerting and uncomfortable, when handled well, it can be genuinely useful.
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety (Harvard Business School, 1999) found that the highest-performing teams surfaced more errors and disagreements than lower-performing ones, not because things were going worse, but because people felt safe enough to say so. The appearance of smooth agreement can be a sign of a team too cautious to think out loud.
The distinction that matters is between task conflict (disagreements about ideas, methods, and priorities) and relationship conflict, which is personal and corrosive. Task conflict, when teams feel safe enough to engage in it, improves decisions, reduces groupthink, and brings out better thinking. The leader’s job is not to eliminate conflict but to help convert relationship friction into productive disagreement and to create conditions where that kind of disagreement is genuinely welcome.
Lencioni’s observation in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002) is also relevant here: teams that avoid conflict don’t eliminate it. They drive it underground, where it reappears as politics, passive resistance, and the meeting-after-the-meeting where people say what they really think. A high performing team is one which confronts problems and issues quickly, gets input from team members with minimal politics and develops practical solutions.
How People Respond to Conflict
Before trying to manage conflict, it helps to understand that people don’t all experience it the same way, and that their responses tend to reveal more about their history than about the present situation.
Thomas and Kilmann’s Conflict Mode Instrument identifies five orientations to conflict, shaped by the balance between pursuing one’s own interests and attending to others’:
| Style | Orientation (Self vs. Others) | When It Helps | When It Doesn't |
|---|---|---|---|
| Competing | High assertiveness, low cooperation | Urgent or non-negotiable decisions | Breeds resentment; silences others |
| Accommodating | Low assertiveness, high cooperation | Preserving goodwill on low-stakes issues | Enables poor decisions; reads as disengagement |
| Avoiding | Low on both | Creating space before a difficult conversation | Allows problems to compound; conflict goes underground |
| Collaborating | High on both | Complex problems needing genuine buy-in | Demands time and psychological safety |
| Compromising | Moderate on both | Time-pressured decisions | Can product solutions no one is fully committed to |
Most people have a habitual style. What’s worth noting is that these styles were rarely formed in professional settings; they were formed much earlier, in families and schools, in the conditions where people first learned whether disagreement was safe. A leader whose early experience taught them that conflict leads to rupture will respond differently to friction than one who learned that it was just another problem to work through.
Kets de Vries (2005) observed that the roles people played growing up, the peacemaker, the scapegoat, the hero, tend to resurface in teams with striking consistency. When someone’s reaction to a workplace conflict feels disproportionate to the situation, it usually is. The situation is rarely the whole story, and it is worth exploring one’s own habitual reactions to conflict more deeply.
What’s Happening Beneath the Surface
Psychodynamic thinking can offer some insights into understanding the hidden dynamics underlying team conflict.
The Hedgehog Dilemma
Kets de Vries (2012) draws on a parable from the philosopher Schopenhauer: hedgehogs on a cold winter’s night huddle together for warmth, but their quills cause pain, so they move apart. The cold drives them back. Over time, they find a workable distance; close enough for warmth, far enough to avoid injury.
In organisational life, something similar plays out constantly. People want to belong, to collaborate, to feel part of something. They also want to protect themselves, their status, their sense of self, and their territory. The closer teams work, the more likely their psychological quills are to make contact. Managing this distance, creating enough closeness for genuine collaboration while maintaining enough safety to tolerate friction, is one of the less visible tasks of leadership.
Transference
One of the more unsettling insights from psychoanalytic thinking is how much of what we feel about our colleagues is not about them. Transference, or the unconscious displacement of feelings from earlier significant relationships onto people in the present, is a routine feature of working life. The boss who triggers something that feels strangely personal about authority figures. The colleague who inspires loyalty that seems to go beyond the professional. The team member who inexplicably raises your hackles.
Kets de Vries (2005) also notes that these reactions are real, but their source is historical. Leaders who have some awareness of this, in others and in themselves, are less likely to be captured by it.
Social Defences
Groups also develop collective patterns for managing anxiety. The team that never reaches a decision (always needs more data) may be defending against the discomfort of being wrong. The team that never surfaces disagreement may be defending against the fear of rupture. These defences reduce anxiety in the short term but prevent learning in the long term. When a team’s patterns feel rigid or repetitive, it is usually worth asking what anxiety is being managed, and at what cost.
A Guide to Identifying and Navigating Conflict
| Conflict Type | Typical Signals | What's Often Underneath | First Move | Approach |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Task | Heated debate about decisions and methods | Genuine differences in expertise or values | Make space; name it as productive | Structured dissent; devil's advocate role |
| Role/Territory | Duplicated effort, ownership disputes | Unclear mandates; no shared map | Clarify accountabilities explicitly | Team Charter; RACI Framework |
| Status/Recognition | Withdrawal, credit disputes, passive resistance | Perceived unfairness; status threat | Acknowledge contribution; investigate the perception | 1:1 conversations; review how recognition is distributed |
| Interpersonal | Avoidance, coalition-forming, persistent tension | History, transference, incompatible styles | Meet 1:1 before convening the group | Courageous conversations; principled negotiation (Fisher and Ury, 1981), Humble inquiry (Schein, 2013) |
| Values/Cultural | Recurring friction about priorities or ways of working | Deep differences in worldview or identity | Name the difference directly | Explicit team values work; culture mapping |
| Structural | Same conflict, recurring; different players, same pattern | Organisational design creates competition by default | Look for the system, not the person | Incentive alignment review; structural redesign |
| Suppressed/Avoided | Unusual politeness; absence of debate; disengagement | Fear of rupture; psychological unsafety | Signal that disagreement is welcome, and mean it | Psychological safety-building (Edmondson, 1999) |
What Leaders Can Do
Build trust before you need it
The conditions that make conflict productive must be built in advance. Kets de Vries (2005) describes trust as a precondition for everything that matters in team life: honest information sharing, genuine commitment, and accountability. It is built through small, consistent behaviours, following through, being willing to say you were wrong, and showing people that you see them as more than their function.
Create psychological safety
Edmondson’s research is clear: psychological safety is not about warmth or comfort. It’s about whether people believe they can speak honestly without being punished for it. Leaders create or destroy it primarily through how they respond when someone raises a concern or pushes back. Responding with curiosity rather than defensiveness, e.g. tell me more about that, is a small thing that carries significant weight over time.
Name what you see without diagnosing it
There is something quietly powerful about a leader who notices a pattern and names it without assigning blame: I’ve noticed that conversations between the two teams tend to get stuck here; I’m curious about what’s happening. This is different from the problem is that your team doesn’t communicate. The first opens a system; the second closes it. Argyris’s work on double-loop learning (Organizational Learning, 1978) suggests that examining the assumptions behind a behaviour, not just the behaviour itself, is where real change becomes possible.
Design for productive disagreement
Some teams don’t need less conflict; they need better structures for it. A few approaches include spaces for the team to conduct post-mortems which help project teams identify risks at the outset; a designated devil’s advocate role that makes challenges impersonal; and team agreements that make explicit how decisions are made and how disagreements will be handled. None of these eliminates friction completely, but they could give it somewhere useful to go.
Recognise when outside help is warranted
If the same conflicts keep returning, with the same people, in the same recurring patterns, something more than a process fix is usually needed. Kets de Vries (2005) argues that working through deep team conflict requires a facilitator with genuine psychological literacy, not just skilled process management, but the ability to read what is happening beneath the surface. There is no shame in bringing in outside support. The more important question is whether the conflict is being worked through or simply managed around.
A Note on Self-Awareness
This piece would be incomplete without acknowledging something most leadership writing is reluctant to say directly: your conflict style, your own transferential patterns, and your particular hedgehog quills are part of the system, too.
Kets de Vries (2005) observed that when executives received honest 360-degree feedback, often for the first time in their careers, many were genuinely shaken. Not because it was unfair, but because it was accurate, and they had simply never had access to it before. The more senior a person becomes, the fewer people are willing to tell them the truth about how they land on others.
The most useful thing a leader can do with that insight is not to feel bad about it, but to become curious about it. Understanding how your own history shapes your responses to conflict – what it triggers in you and why – is not a peripheral concern. It is close to the centre of the work.