29 Jun Conflict Management in Organizations: Why Conflicts Can’t Be Resolved
The best team I’ve ever worked with argued more than the worst one.
On one team, pushback flew across the table on a regular basis, sometimes loud, sometimes still simmering a few days later. Decisions got challenged even after they seemed settled. On the other team, everything was pleasant. Nobody pushed back openly, decisions looked unanimous. That second team failed to make a single one of the course corrections it actually needed, for months. The first team made several.
On the first team, uncomfortable decisions surfaced early and got fought out before they could harden into something fixed. On the second, they got postponed out of consideration for the good mood, until they resolved themselves, usually at the expense of the actual issue.
That doesn’t fit the conventional idea of conflict management. There, harmony is the goal, and conflict is the disruption you’re supposed to fix as fast as possible. But when conflict disappears, an organization’s ability to correct itself often disappears with it.
Conflict management, as it’s usually practiced, aims at ending the conflict. That’s exactly the wrong target.
Contents
Conflict Management Doesn’t Mean Ending Conflicts
A Scheduling Request Turns Into a Power Struggle
Relational, Structural, or Paradoxical: Why the Cause Determines the Intervention
Why Conflict Turns People Into Someone Else
Why Consensus Isn’t Automatically the Better Outcome
Conflict Management in Practice: Why a Conflict-Free Organization Is a Bad Sign
Conflict Management Doesn’t Mean Ending Conflicts
A conflict that has taken shape rarely ends on its own, because one side suddenly realizes the other was right. It ends when one of four things happens:
➡️ One side gives up its position
➡️ The relationship breaks off
➡️ A compromise emerges
➡️ A third party decides
Until then, it keeps running, regardless of whether anyone likes that.
None of these four moves is automatically the right one. Sometimes a clean break is the only honest answer. Sometimes a hasty decision from above prevents exactly the clarification the dispute was supposed to produce. Which move fits isn’t something you can read off people’s behavior. It depends on the function the conflict is serving right now.
The sociologist Niklas Luhmann describes conflicts as systems that sustain themselves through their own processes. Once a conflict exists, it no longer needs its original trigger to keep running. It feeds on itself.
A Scheduling Request Turns Into a Power Struggle
A sales director asks a colleague from product to bump a request up the queue. The colleague refuses, reading it as an attempt to override his own prioritization. The sales director hears the refusal as a sign that her request isn’t being taken seriously at all, and pushes harder. The colleague, in turn, hears that pushback as his professional judgment being questioned, and digs in further. Neither one started the fight. Both are reacting to their own interpretation of the other, not to what was actually said. That loop is what keeps the conflict alive, regardless of the original topic.
The organizational consultant, executive coach, and author of several professional books Klaus Eidenschink draws a sharp line between two basic stances:
1️⃣ Resolving: making a problem disappear for good
2️⃣ Managing: dealing with a dynamic that doesn’t disappear, only changes shape
Conflicts always fall into the second category. They can’t be resolved, only managed. Within management, Eidenschink distinguishes two further moves:
➡️ Stoke it: deliberately sharpen a conflict when it’s too weak to force the clarification a topic needs, and the issue would otherwise stay buried
➡️ De-escalate it: take the edge off when a conflict turns destructive or stops producing new information and just starts causing damage
Both are leadership work, not an excuse to avoid leadership work. Either way, you don’t get a conflict off the table for good.
So asking who’s at fault is usually the wrong question. The better question is what function the conflict is serving right now, and whether that function is helping the organization or hurting it.
Relational, Structural, or Paradoxical: Why the Cause Determines the Intervention
Most leaders treat every conflict the same way: put two people in a room, facilitate, hope for understanding. That works when the conflict is genuinely interpersonal. It doesn’t work when it’s something else.
Three Causes, Three Different Responses
1. Relational conflict: grows out of the actual relationship between two people, out of history, antipathy, or a genuine misunderstanding. Mediation can actually move something here.
2. Structural conflict: grows out of how roles, budgets, or decision rights are distributed. Two department heads aren’t fighting because they dislike each other. They’re fighting because their goals were set against each other, and one can only win if the other loses. A conversation about communication styles won’t help here. Only changing the structure that’s forcing the fight will.
3. Paradoxical conflict: grows out of a contradiction the organization itself never resolved. Move faster and be more thorough. Cut costs and raise quality. Demanding both at once, and treating both as equally important, produces a dispute that can’t be closed, because it isn’t wrong. It only makes visible that the organization is putting off a decision. A sales team told to satisfy every customer request while also cutting the cost per deal will inevitably end up fighting itself. The answer isn’t more effort. It’s an organization that openly decides which side wins when push comes to shove.
Eidenschink himself draws an even finer distinction, across nine separate axes instead of three causes, but he’s answering a different question: not why a conflict started, but how it’s behaving right now. For this overview, the three causes are enough. The finer version has its own place.
Confusing these three causes is the most common mistake in conflict management. Treat a structural conflict as personal and answer it with personality development, and you’ll just leave both sides feeling even more misunderstood. Where a structural conflict like this shows up, redesigning the structure that’s forcing the conflict in the first place usually does more than another round of facilitated conversation.
How to tell these three causes apart in practice, and which questions help, is something I go into in “Relational, Structural, Paradoxical: The Three Causes of Every Leadership Conflict” (link coming).
Why Conflict Turns People Into Someone Else
Some people don’t recognize themselves in an argument. They say things they never thought they’d say, threaten consequences they never meant to threaten, and wonder the next day what got into them.
That’s not a character flaw. Klaus Eidenschink describes how a conflict shapes the people in it into whatever it needs them to be in order to keep running. The person who shows up inside a conflict isn’t the whole person. Call it the conflict self: a version of someone that the conflict itself produces, regardless of how that person behaves otherwise.
Do I have a conflict, or does the conflict have me? – Klaus Eidenschink (The Art of Conflict)
That question decides whether someone in a fight is still acting or only reacting. That’s the entire difference between a person and their conflict self.
It’s the same logic that applies to leadership. Leadership isn’t a fixed trait of a person, it’s a function produced by the situation. The same goes for conflict behavior. The structure of the conflict produces the behavior, not the character of the people in it.
An otherwise level-headed manager who suddenly threatens disciplinary action in an argument with a colleague isn’t acting out of character. She’s responding to the logic of a conflict that needs exactly that edge to keep itself going. The same is true in reverse. Someone who becomes unusually accommodating in a conflict, despite normally being assertive, hasn’t suddenly discovered new values. They’re responding to the same logic, from the other direction.
That has an uncomfortable implication for classic conflict management. A communication skills workshop won’t change much if the structure keeps producing the same conflict. You’re training the person for a situation the structure creates, not the person. Getting to know your own conflict persona is hard to do alone, since people are usually the least objective observer of their own blind spot. That’s exactly where getting an outside view of your own role in the conflict tends to be the faster route.
How to recognize this conflict in your own behavior, and regulate it deliberately, is something I cover in “Why People Don’t Recognize Themselves in Conflict” (link coming soon).
Why Consensus Isn’t Automatically the Better Outcome
In most organizations, consensus counts as proof that a conflict was resolved well. That confuses two different things: whether everyone agrees, and whether the solution actually does justice to the underlying problem.
A compromise is a partial loss for both sides, even when it feels like a shared win in the moment. Both parties give up something that mattered to them, and the substantive issue often only gets partly addressed, or not at all. How satisfied people feel about reaching an agreement says nothing about how good that agreement actually is.
This is exactly where what passes for a consensus ritual in many organizations comes from: people negotiate until everyone can sign off, and mistake that sign-off for a good decision. But consensus is only one of several ways to manage a conflict. It’s not proof that the best answer was found.
The better question isn’t whether everyone agrees. It’s whether the resulting arrangement actually carries the underlying problem, or whether it just ends the dispute temporarily, until it resurfaces somewhere else.
Why compromises often leave both sides losing, and when an open conflict is the more honest path, is something I cover in “Consensus Is Just Another Form of Conflict Management” (link coming soon).
Conflict Management in Practice: Why a Conflict-Free Organization Is a Bad Sign
Organizations aren’t functional despite conflict. They’re built around it. Every decision about budget, priority, or responsibility is, at its core, an institutionalized way of working out conflict: a procedure that determines who gets to fight about what, when, and who ultimately decides.
A department where nobody has openly disagreed for months isn’t a sign of a healthy culture. More often, it’s a sign that disagreement no longer has anywhere to go, and instead lives on as withdrawal, quiet quitting, or people leaving for a competitor without saying why. The conflict hasn’t disappeared. It’s just moved to a different stage.
Treating harmony as the goal confuses a side effect with the actual job. Trust and an open climate show up where an organization has learned to handle disagreement productively. They don’t show up because disagreement gets avoided. They show up because the structure can hold it.
Some organizations build this in on purpose. Product development and quality assurance reporting to different managers is one example. Both sides inevitably represent opposing interests, speed against thoroughness, and that’s the point. The friction between them isn’t a malfunction, it’s built-in self-correction. Merge the two roles to avoid the conflict, and you also lose the one voice still standing up for one of the two interests.
Exactly where conflict should become visible in an organization, and where it shouldn’t, is something I cover in “Why a Conflict-Free Organization Is a Warning Sign” (link coming soon).
Conclusion: Conflict Management as Diagnosis, Not Cleanup
When leadership teams ask me how to finally “get the conflict problem under control,” I ask first what problem they actually mean. Most of the time, they don’t have an answer yet, because they’re treating conflict as a single, shapeless evil that’s supposed to go away.
Conflict management, properly understood, doesn’t start with a method. It starts with a diagnosis. Is the cause relational, structural, or paradoxical? Is the structure producing behavior that’s being wrongly blamed on the person? And would a quick agreement actually be progress, or just a more comfortable place to retreat to before the next fight?
Asking these questions before intervening saves you the cleanup that follows every failed attempt at conflict facilitation. The organizations that handle conflict most robustly don’t have less of it than everyone else. They’ve just learned where to let it happen, and where to contain it, instead of fearing it across the board.
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If conflict in your organization either escalates or disappears without a trace, with rarely anything in between, it’s worth taking a closer look at the structure behind it.