Category: Conflict Resolution & Communication
There is a tendency, in both popular and managerial discourse, to treat the presence of conflict in an organization as evidence of dysfunction. Conflict is read as a symptom — of poor culture, of difficult personalities, of a breakdown in something that ought to have held. This framing is intuitive, but it is also, I want to argue, fundamentally mistaken, and the mistake is not merely academic. It shapes how leaders respond, and in shaping the response, it frequently produces the very harm it fears.
Conflict, properly understood, is not a failure state. Bush and Folger (1994) describe conflict as a crisis in human interaction, a moment in which the communication process between parties destabilizes. What is notable about this definition is that it is descriptive rather than evaluative. Conflict is neither good nor bad in itself; it is simply a descriptor for the state of an interaction at a particular point in time. An organization that experiences conflict is not thereby a troubled organization. It is an organization in which people are engaged enough, and invested enough, to have something at stake. The relevant question is not whether conflict occurs — it always occurs — but whether the organization possesses the structures and the skills to engage it with dignity and precision. The distinction that matters, in other words, is between managed and unmanaged conflict, and that distinction has almost nothing to do with the conflict itself.
Consider a case that will be familiar, in its outlines, to anyone who has worked in the nonprofit sector. A small organization in Philadelphia, doing essential community work on a budget that never quite matched its mission, had assembled the kind of staff that such organizations depend upon: people who accepted less compensation than they could have commanded elsewhere because they believed in the work. The organization also had an individual in a position of leadership whose decisions, over time, increasingly did not sit well with those carrying out the day-to-day labor of the organization.
The staff did what conscientious people do. They raised issues. They named, through the channels available to them, the problems they were observing. They did not sabotage or withdraw; at least initially, they engaged in good faith, on the assumption that to name a problem to leadership is to begin the process of solving it. This assumption, it turns out, was not warranted. Nothing substantive was done. The concerns were heard, perhaps acknowledged, and then absorbed back into the daily churn of the organization without resolution. Here we arrive at the dynamic that organizations consistently underestimate: the willingness to raise issues is not a fixed trait of a person, but a behavior that responds to evidence. Each instance in which a concern is raised and nothing follows is itself a lesson, and the lesson is that voice is futile. Whether or not the leadership intended to teach this lesson is, in a sense, immaterial; the lesson was taught regardless. The staff stopped raising issues in time. And then they left.
The detail that makes this case instructive rather than merely unfortunate is that the organization still exists. There was no scandal, no closure, no dramatic rupture — none of the catastrophic outcomes that leaders typically imagine when they imagine conflict going wrong. The doors remain open and the work, in some diminished form, continues. The organization now operates, however, with a permanent deficit that appears nowhere in its financial statements: the loss, through departure, of the institutional knowledge, the community relationships, the hard-won competence, and the consistent support that the departed staff had embodied. This is what unmanaged conflict actually costs. It is not, in most cases, the explosive confrontation that leaders fear. It is the slow attrition of capability, and it operates as a selective filter, because the people who leave first are rarely the disengaged. They are the engaged — those with sufficient investment to raise concerns and sufficient options to depart when raising them proves pointless. Unmanaged conflict, in this sense, systematically removes an organization’s most capable people.
It is worth being precise about what managing this conflict would have required, because the answer is not that leadership should have simply agreed with the staff. To manage conflict is not to capitulate to every concern, nor to assume that every concern is valid. It is to possess a structure through which concerns are surfaced, weighed, and visibly resolved, so that members can perceive a connection between their voice and the organization’s response, even when the response is not the one they sought. The harmony model of conflict resolution, as Kozan (1997) describes it, begins by minimizing conflict through the observance of mutual obligations — but mutual obligation runs in both directions, and an organization that asks its members to voice concerns incurs a corresponding obligation to engage those concerns substantively. A managed process would have created a legitimate channel for the concerns, distinct from the informal conversations in which they could be quietly absorbed; it would have required of leadership a substantive response, if not always an affirmative one; and it would have treated the repetition of concerns not as background noise but as a signal demanding escalation.
I have come to think that balance, in the organizational sense, is precisely what emerges when structure, communication, and leadership operate in coherence around moments such as these. This organization lost its balance not because conflict appeared, but because it had built no architecture for engaging conflict, and so the conflict resolved itself in the only way unmanaged conflict ever does: through exit. Conflict was never the problem. The absence of a system through which to manage it was the problem.
