Conflict Management

By Team TherapyRoute

Conflict is a normal part of close relationships and shared work.

Conflict is normal, and it is workable

Disagreement is not a sign that something has gone wrong. A clinical review of conflict management puts the case directly. Handled properly, conflict can encourage team-building, critical thinking, new ideas and alternative resolutions.¹ The same review notes that people still tend to see conflict as negative.

So the question is not how to remove conflict from a relationship or a team, but how to tell workable conflict from the kind that does damage. Couple research, family therapy and group psychotherapy have each studied people falling out for decades, and on one point they agree.

The conflict that costs most is often the one nobody is having aloud. Avoidance leaves a matter unresolved, so it festers and builds.¹ Unexpressed hostility does not disappear; it comes out in indirect ways.⁴ In a family, a conflict the parents will not have can surface as a symptom in a child.³

The five conflict styles

People fall into recognisable patterns when conflict arrives. The best-known account is the set of five modes named after Thomas and Kilmann. The table below sets them out as the StatPearls clinical review describes them.¹

Two entries in that table are usually described more warmly elsewhere. Compromise is widely treated as the mature adult option. The review's verdict is that neither party will be fully satisfied, and that the best outcome may not prevail.¹ Giving up part of what you wanted is not the same as solving the problem.

Accommodating is treated just as plainly. In everyday language it is called keeping the peace. But the review calls it one party winning and one losing, and names who pays: the person who gave way, left with a sore spot that causes resentment.¹

Only one of the five is described as reaching a solution everyone accepts as the best outcome. That one is collaboration.¹ The other four are described in terms of what they cost. The list has a practical use. It shows which style you reach for by default, and what that default costs.

What happens when a disagreement goes wrong

Group psychotherapy has one advantage over ordinary life as a place to study conflict. The therapist watches the same people fall out repeatedly, in a room built for the purpose. Yalom's account is that discord, once begun, follows a predictable sequence.⁴

Each side comes to believe that it is right and the other wrong, that it is good and the other bad. The two opposing parties hold those beliefs with equal conviction and certitude, and neither recognises this at the time.⁴

Communication then breaks down. The two sides stop listening to each other with any understanding. Each then sees the other through stereotype. Contrary evidence is ignored, and conciliatory gestures may be read as deceitful tricks.⁴

There is a greater investment in verification of one's own beliefs than in understanding the other.⁴ Distrust is present throughout. Each side views its own actions as honourable and reasonable, and the other's as scheming.

In ordinary life two people stop speaking at this point. The misunderstanding is never corrected.⁴ A therapy group makes them keep talking, which is the only condition under which the distortion can be found and repaired.

Couples: how an argument starts

In Gottman's Seattle laboratory, couples spent fifteen minutes trying to resolve an ongoing disagreement. They were videotaped, and sensors recorded their heart rate and other measures of the circulatory system.²

Anger between partners does not by itself predict a marriage breaking down.² Gottman describes couples in the newlywed study who argued far more than a couple he expected to separate, and who stayed happily married. What mattered was how the disagreement began.

A discussion that opens with criticism or sarcasm is what he calls a harsh start-up. His claim is that a discussion beginning that way will end on a negative note, even when there are many attempts to make nice in between.²

A much-quoted number comes from here. It appears in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Gottman writes that ninety-six percent of the time you can predict the outcome of a conversation from the first three minutes of the fifteen-minute interaction.²

It is routinely repeated as something larger than it is. It predicts the outcome of that conversation, not the fate of the marriage. And it appears in a book written for general readers, with no sample size, no confidence interval and no citation to the study behind it.²

There is a second reason for caution, and it concerns what those three minutes show an observer. Gottman describes a study by Robert Levenson and Rachel Ebling. The first three minutes of arguments between ten married couples, half of whom later divorced, were shown to therapists, researchers and pastoral counsellors, who were asked to predict each outcome. On average their predictions were no more accurate than chance.⁶

Most of those observers attended to the dramatic exchanges. They did not notice how much of the time each couple stayed calm and unemotional, which was what actually tracked with staying together. In a separate study of couples in their mid-forties and sixties, Gottman found that happy couples spent about sixty-five percent of a disagreement in that calm state, against about forty-seven percent for unhappy couples.⁶

So the three minutes carry real information, though not the information an experienced observer looks for. That is a reason to be careful with the headline figure, not a reason to discard the research.

Gottman's better-known contribution is a group of four patterns. He calls them the Four Horsemen, and they tend to arrive in this order.²

• Criticism. Global, and aimed at the other person's character or personality rather than at an event.²
• Contempt. Arising from a sense of superiority, and expressed as sarcasm, name-calling, eye-rolling, mockery or hostile humour.²
• Defensiveness. Warding off blame, which is really a way of saying the problem is not me, it is you.²
• Stonewalling. Tuning out and withdrawing from the exchange rather than confronting it.²

Two qualifications come with that list, and both get dropped when it is repeated. The four do not always arrive in strict order, and they can follow each other repeatedly. All of them turn up in some stable marriages.² Trouble starts when they become permanent.

The distinction behind the horsemen is between a complaint and a criticism. A complaint has three parts: how I feel, about a very specific situation, and what I need or want or prefer.² A criticism drops the specifics and addresses the person instead. Its two commonest forms are statements built on you always and you never.

What separates couples who survive the horsemen is repair. A repair attempt is an effort to de-escalate tension during a difficult discussion. It can be as ordinary as saying let us take a break, or I need to calm down.² Whether repairs are heard is what matters.

The presence of the four horsemen alone predicted divorce with an accuracy rate of eighty-two percent, and adding the failure of repair attempts took the accuracy into the nineties.² Among newlyweds who scored high on the horsemen but repaired effectively, eighty-four percent were in stable, happy marriages six years later.

One last finding changes the aim. In these studies sixty-nine percent of marital conflicts were perpetual rather than solvable, meaning couples were still arguing the same argument at four-year follow-up.² Gottman's conclusion is that you do not have to resolve your major conflicts for a relationship to thrive. The couples who did well had learned to live with a problem they could not solve, often with humour.

Families: the argument you can see may not be the one happening

Family therapy adds something the other literatures do not: it treats conflict as a property of a structure, rather than of the people inside it.

Minuchin starts by removing blame. Parents cannot protect and guide without at the same time controlling and restricting, and children cannot grow and become individuated without rejecting and attacking. His conclusion is that the process of socialisation is inherently conflictual.³ Conflict between parents and children is not evidence that a family has failed, but part of raising someone.

Structure works through boundaries. He defines these as the rules setting out who participates, and how. Their function is to protect the differentiation of the system, meaning that each part of a family keeps its own job. What matters is not who belongs to a subsystem but how clearly its boundaries are drawn. A parental subsystem that includes a grandmother or an older child can work perfectly well, provided lines of responsibility and authority are clear.³

Families fall along a continuum. At one end is enmeshment, where boundaries are diffuse and involvement is excessive. At the other is disengagement, where boundaries are rigid and people are cut off. Most families sit in the wide normal range between them. These are styles of relating rather than a verdict of functional or broken, and most families contain both at once, with a mother and small children enmeshed while the father stays at a distance.³

The enmeshed family responds to any variation from the accustomed with excessive speed and intensity. The disengaged family tends not to respond when a response is necessary. Parents in an enmeshed family may become tremendously upset because a child does not eat his dessert. Parents in a disengaged family may feel unconcerned about a child's hatred of school.³

A family's methods for defusing conflict operate swiftly and automatically. A husband may attack himself whenever he senses his wife is about to attack him. That leaves her nothing to challenge, so the confrontation never takes place.³

A child can become disruptive, or develop other symptoms, when the parents begin to move into conflict.³ Minuchin calls this a conflict-detouring mechanism. The therapeutic work is to break up the rigid triad, the fixed pattern binding parents and child together, by blocking the child's interference in the parents' conflict.

In one family, conflict between the spouses is avoided by scapegoating a son. When the wife challenges her husband for not earning more, he turns to the boy and corrects his behaviour. That restores his own threatened sense of competence. When the husband challenges the wife for being a poor housekeeper, she begins to talk about the child's misbehaviour at school.³

The boy's difficult behaviour has a function: it keeps the marriage steady, because the parents' conflict is directed at him instead of at each other. Treating him as the problem would leave the structure untouched.

Groups and teams: what suppressed conflict costs

A good team is usually assumed to be a harmonious one. It would be a mistake to equate cohesiveness with comfort.⁴ Cohesiveness here means how strongly members are attached to the group and to each other.

Cohesive groups show greater acceptance and intimacy. They also permit greater development and expression of hostility and conflict.⁴ Their norms encourage open disagreement alongside support. Yalom compares such groups to families that fight a good deal among themselves and are strongly loyal.

Unless hostility can be expressed openly, persistent covert hostile attitudes may hamper the development of cohesiveness itself.⁴ Unexpressed hostility finds indirect outlets.

This reverses the order most teams assume. Cohesiveness is the primary prerequisite for the successful management of conflict, not the reward for having avoided it.⁴ A group and its members have to matter enough to each other that they are willing to bear the discomfort of working something through.

Yalom is equally clear that abolishing conflict is not the goal. It recurs despite the successful resolution of past conflicts, and despite considerable mutual respect and warmth.⁴ Unrestrained expression of rage is not the goal either.

The task is to use conflict in the service of growth. That means finding the right level, since too much and too little are both counterproductive.⁴ He describes the leader as constantly adjusting the level of conflict.

The adjustment runs both ways, and the second direction is the one usually left out. When a group cannot agree on anything, the leader looks for resolution and asks why any commonality is being denied. When a group agrees on everything, the leader looks for diversity and differentiation.⁴ Sustained unanimity is treated as a problem to work on, not as evidence of a healthy team.

The method has two steps: conflict is first experienced, then reflected on. The leader controls it by moving the group from the first stage into the second. Yalom describes this as creating a space for reflection, in which members can explore their own contributions to the conflict, and says it may make the difference between therapeutic impasse and growth.⁴

One further observation applies to working life. Almost invariably, two members who feel considerable mutual antagonism have the potential to be of great value to each other, because in their anger each will tell the other important and unpalatable truths.⁴ People who genuinely care nothing for each other simply ignore each other.

He also names the sign that a group has stopped being safe. One member is treated as a mascot, someone whose opinions and anger are lightly regarded. That jeopardises cohesiveness for everyone, because the next most peripheral member has reason to expect the same treatment.⁴

Deciding what you are actually aiming at

Linehan's skills manual offers a way of deciding what you want from a difficult conversation. It calls clarifying your priorities the first and most important interpersonal skill. It then separates three things that a difficult exchange can be about.⁵

The three are what you actually want and how important it is, keeping a positive relationship, and keeping your own self-respect.⁵ The manual attaches a question to the third, and it is a useful one. How do I want to feel about myself after this interaction is over, whether or not I get the result I want.

The usual summary leaves out that the three can conflict. They are balanced, not maximised. Sometimes it is important to push hard for your objective. At other times it can be equally important to give up your own goal in favour of someone else's.⁵

The manual is candid that any of the three can be overplayed. Making self-respect the main issue in almost every interaction, by always needing to be on top or to have control, does not work.⁵

One warning matters more than the rest. Using relationship-preserving skills well will usually strengthen self-respect. Most people's sense of self-respect depends partly on the quality of their relationships. But used often with a person who abuses you, or who does not care about you, those same skills will wear down your self-respect.⁵

When it is not conflict: abuse and coercive control

Everything above assumes two people with roughly comparable power. Where one person is frightened, controlled or hurt by another, this is not mutual conflict. It is abuse, or coercive control, meaning a pattern of behaviour that frightens, isolates or controls a person. That is a safety matter, not a communication problem.

The tools on this page assume both sides have comparable power. Applying them where that is not true can raise the danger. Compromise assumes it is safe to concede. Linehan's warning is the relevant one: persistently accommodating a person who abuses you wears down your self-respect rather than protecting the relationship.⁵

If this is your situation, your safety comes first. Support is available. Asking for it is reasonable. Please speak with a professional, or find helplines and crisis lines from around the world.

When to seek professional help

Some conflicts ease with time, honesty and small repairs. Others stay stuck, and some keep hurting the people involved. A conflict at home or at work may keep returning in the same form, and that repetition is itself worth taking to someone.

A therapist can work with an individual, a couple, a family or a group. The choice of format follows from where the conflict sits, not from who is most distressed by it. Both Minuchin and Yalom describe situations in which the person carrying the symptom is not the person the difficulty belongs to.³⁴

This page is general information, not advice. It cannot assess your situation. For that, please speak with a qualified professional.

You can start with our guide on finding the right therapist for you.

References

1. [1] Ronquillo, Y., Ellis, V. L., & Toney-Butler, T. J. (2023). Conflict management. In StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470432.
2. [2] Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (Rev. ed.). Harmony Books. Chapters 3 (How I Predict Divorce) and 8 (The Two Kinds of Marital Conflict).
3. [3] Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and Family Therapy. Harvard University Press. Chapters A Family Model (boundaries, enmeshment and disengagement) and Restructuring the Family (developing implicit conflict).
4. [4] Yalom, I. D., with Leszcz, M. (2005). The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (5th ed.). Basic Books. Chapter 3 (Group Cohesiveness) and chapter 12 (The Advanced Group), section Conflict in the Therapy Group.
5. [5] Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT Skills Training Manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. Interpersonal effectiveness module, handouts 4 to 7. psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-55948-000.
6. [6] Gottman, J. M. (2012). What Makes Love Last? Simon & Schuster. Chapter 2, reporting Levenson and Ebling on expert prediction from three-minute conflict samples.