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Conflict Management and Resolution Strategies
Project Management · Chapter 11: Team Dynamics and Conflict ResolutionSection 11.5 · lesson 71 of 7315 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Diagnose project conflict, choose a handling style, and negotiate on interests.
- Identify common sources of project conflict and tell functional from dysfunctional conflict
- Compare the five Thomas-Kilmann styles and match one to a situation
- Apply interest-based negotiation by separating positions from interests
- Explain when to use mediation or escalation and how to prevent conflict
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Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (2,121 words). Read along, or search it.
Opening Question
Drainage Redesign Versus a Booked Tiling Crew
At Meridian's new Harbor Street clinic, an inspection finds that part of the drainage under the treatment wing must be redrawn, before any tile goes down. Hana, the design lead, says tiling must wait for the full revised drawings. That takes six working days. Kwame, the site supervisor, says his tiling crew starts on day twenty, as booked. Much later than that, and he loses the crew to another job. By the time Dana, the project manager, hears about it, Hana says Kwame ignores the design, and Kwame says Hana ignores the site. Who's right? And is there an answer better than either of theirs?
Conflict Defined
Why Conflict Is Normal on Projects
A conflict is a situation where two or more parties see their goals, needs, or ideas as incompatible, and each is affected by how it's settled. On projects, conflict is normal, because limited resources meet competing demands. Picture one electrical crew, needed by the reception area and the treatment rooms in the same week. Each lead has a good reason to go first, and nobody behaved badly. So the question isn't whether conflict happens, but how well it's handled. A team with no visible disagreement may simply be hiding it. And a badly handled conflict costs twice: once in the delay or poor decision, and again in the relationships that later work depends on.
Sources
Seven Common Sources of Project Conflict
Naming the source comes first, because a clash over a deadline needs a different response from a clash over who decides. Seven sources are common. Schedule: when work starts, finishes, or is handed over. Priority: which worthwhile task matters most. Resource: who gets a limited supply of people, money, equipment, or space. Technical: how the work should be done, with reasoned views on each side. Role: who's responsible for, or entitled to decide, a piece of work. Personality: friction from differences in working style, temperament, or values. Communication: information that's missing, late, unclear, or understood differently by sender and receiver. Sources overlap. What looks like a personality clash may be a role gap, where nobody knows who decides. That label ends the inquiry, so first ask what people actually disagree about. Hana and Kwame's dispute is about schedule and technical method, and it's starting to turn personal.
Functional or Dysfunctional
Four Questions to Tell Them Apart
Conflict isn't always harmful. Functional conflict improves decisions or work: ideas get tested, assumptions exposed, and the parties stay on the problem. Dysfunctional conflict damages the work or the relationships, because energy goes into winning, blaming, or avoiding people. An argument over whether a partition meets the fire-safety requirement, ending with a check and a better partition, was functional. If it ends with two people no longer sharing information, it turned dysfunctional. Four questions tell them apart. Is it about the issue, or the person? Is information still flowing? Is it producing options, or repeating positions? Will it be settled in time? Watch the direction of travel. Left unresolved, or once remarks turn personal, functional conflict slides into the other kind. Hana and Kwame are sliding.
Thomas-Kilmann Model
Five Styles on Two Dimensions
To choose a response, many teams use the Thomas-Kilmann model: five ways of handling conflict, set on two dimensions. Assertiveness is how far you try to satisfy your own concerns. Cooperativeness is how far you try to satisfy the other party's concerns. Competing is high in assertiveness and low in cooperativeness: you pursue your position, and expect the other side to give way, often using authority. Collaborating is high in both: working together on a solution that fully meets both sides' needs. Compromising sits in the middle: each side gives up part of what it wants, for a quick, partial settlement. Avoiding is low in both: sidestepping the conflict by withdrawing, postponing, or ignoring it. Accommodating is low in assertiveness and high in cooperativeness: setting aside your own wishes, so the other party gets what it wants. No style is best everywhere. Each one fits some situations, and carries its own risk.
When Styles Fit
Each Style's Best Use and Risk
Competing fits urgent decisions, like a safety problem, or a stand against an improper request. Its risk: resentment, and people who stop raising problems. Collaborating fits important issues where both sets of needs matter, the relationship will continue, and there's time. Its risk: it's slow, and wasted on small issues. Compromising fits moderate issues when time is short, and a workable middle will do. Its risk: the middle may fit neither side's real need. Avoiding fits trivial issues, or a needed cooling-off pause. Its risk: the problem grows, and others decide in your place. Accommodating fits when the issue matters far more to the other party, or when you find you're wrong. Its risk: your own needs go unmet, and habitual yielding hides problems.
Quick Check
Chart Colors and a Year of Goodwill
Quick check. Ana, a developer, cares a great deal about the colors in a shared report's charts. Jun barely cares either way, and the two will work together all year. Which style fits Jun best? Pause, and decide. Accommodating. The issue matters far more to Ana, and goodwill over a year is worth more to Jun than winning a point about colors. Collaborating would spend real time on something small, and competing would trade goodwill for nothing Jun needs.
Choosing a Style
Urgency, Importance, Relationship and Power
Four features of a situation usually decide the style. Urgency: how soon a decision is needed. The importance of the issue. The importance of the relationship. And the balance of power. Power changes what's safe, and what's honest. A manager who competes with a subordinate may win, and stop hearing candid news. And a subordinate who accommodates a boss may be yielding from caution, not judgment. Under a big power gap, check that agreement is freely given. The model is useful as a vocabulary. But its labels simplify, real reactions mix styles, and styles are usually measured by self-report questionnaires, which can differ from what others observe. The same person may compete over a safety hazard, accommodate over a small preference, and collaborate on a design. Treat a style as a choice for a situation, not a personality trait.
Applied Choice
Time-Boxed Collaboration With a Fallback
Dana weighs the styles. Competing, deciding herself, is fast. But Hana and Kwame will work with her for five more months, and a ruling could end the candid reports she relies on. Avoiding would let the crew start by default: a decision made by drift. Compromising, splitting the difference, never asks why each of them holds their position. Collaborating needs time, and the crew booking forces a decision within days. So she chooses a time-boxed form of collaborating: one short meeting, on one question. How can tiling start without laying tile over drains that might move? And she tells both: if there's no agreement by the end of the next day, she'll decide, and tell her own manager. That fixes the point where she'd switch to competing.
Interest-Based Negotiation
Positions, Interests, Options and Criteria
The meeting follows interest-based negotiation: work out what each party needs, then design a solution tested against agreed standards. It's collaborating, step by step. First, separate the people from the problem. The drawings won't be ready by day twenty, and the crew is booked from day twenty: that's a problem. Telling Hana she always holds up the crew is about a person. Second, look past positions to interests. A position is what a party demands. An interest is the need that makes the demand matter, and asking why usually reveals it. Hana's position: wait for the full set, six days. Her interest: no tile laid and then broken out. Kwame's position: start on day twenty. His interest: keeping his crew, and he can hold them for at most three days of delay. Third, generate several options, keeping inventing separate from judging. Fourth, agree criteria first: the fair test both sides accept. They agree on three: no tile over unconfirmed drainage, the crew held no more than three days, and the smallest possible slip.
Worked Example
Splitting Drawings Into Two Zones
Tiling takes fifteen working days. The finish day is the start day plus the duration, and the slip is the new finish minus the planned finish, day thirty-five. Option one, Hana's position: start on day twenty-six, and finish on day forty-one. A six-day slip, with the crew held six days. It fails the crew criterion. Option two, Kwame's position: finish on day thirty-five, but tile may go over drains that later move. It fails the first criterion. Option three is new. Hana issues the drawings in two packages: zone A after three days, and the rest after six. The crew starts zone A on day twenty-three. Zone A takes eight days, ending on day thirty-one. Zone B's drawings arrive on day twenty-six, five days before the crew needs them. The finish is day twenty-three plus fifteen: day thirty-eight. A three-day slip, with the crew held three days, right at the limit. Neither got their position. Both got their interest, at the cost of a three-day slip, and a dependence on Hana splitting her drawing work.
Mediation
A Neutral Party Without Power to Impose
This process stalls when emotions run high, trust is low, or both sides keep restating positions. Then it's time for mediation. A mediator is a neutral third party who helps the parties reach their own agreement, without any power to impose one. The mediator runs the conversation, and the parties own the result. The mediator agrees ground rules, lets each side describe the issue, and restates it so both feel understood. Then the mediator moves them to interests, options, and criteria, and writes down the agreement. A mediator who says who's right has started acting as a judge. Mediation works only if both parties take part, and see the mediator as fair. It doesn't replace proper handling of a safety hazard, a possible legal violation, or serious misconduct. Those go straight to the people responsible.
Escalation
Referring a Dispute Upward the Right Way
Escalation is referring a dispute to someone with more authority, when the parties can't settle it themselves. It's a normal step, not an admission of failure. It's right when the parties have tried in good faith and remain stuck, when the fix is beyond their authority, or when a deadline will pass first. Safety, legal, or ethical issues are escalated at once, not worked through first. How matters as much as when. Tell each other first. Frame it as a request for a decision, not a complaint. And never go around your own manager in secret. Bring a short written summary: the issue in neutral terms, what each side needs, the options and criteria, the steps taken, and the cost of leaving it open. Escalate too early, and people stop settling what they could. Too late, and the problem grows. And any decision from above weakens the parties' ownership. Across organizations, the process is the same, with three differences. There's no shared manager, so escalation climbs each organization's line, or a named joint body. A written agreement may set its own dispute steps, which is a question for lawyers. And the mediator should come from neither organization.
Quick Check
A Fix That Needs Money Neither Holds
Quick check. Two team leads on another Meridian project have worked through the process in good faith. They agree the only workable option needs extra money. Neither of them controls that money. What comes next? Pause, and decide. Escalation. The fix is beyond their authority, so it goes, jointly and in writing, to whoever controls that money. A mediator can't approve spending either, because mediation helps parties agree on what they can decide themselves. And no compromise between them can create money that neither one holds.
Prevention
Roles, Charters, Early Signals and Check-Ins
Prevention can't remove conflict. But it can make disputes smaller, earlier, and easier to settle. First, clear roles: who does the work, who decides, who's consulted, and who's informed. Many conflicts start as an unanswered question about who decides. Second, the team charter and ground rules, including how disagreements are raised. Agreeing how to disagree is easier before a dispute than in the middle of one. Third, early signals: handovers starting to slip, messages growing shorter or more formal, routine notes suddenly copying managers, someone going quiet, jokes with an edge. A signal doesn't prove a conflict. It's a prompt to ask. And fourth, open communication, like regular check-ins, so a problem can be raised safely while it's small.
Case Resolved
Both Interests Met With a Three-Day Slip
Back to Hana and Kwame. Who was right? Each position was reasonable, and neither one was the answer. Asking why turned two positions into two interests, and the zone split met both. The tiling started on day twenty-three, and the plan was theirs, not Dana's. Dana gave up the speed of simply ruling, and spent a morning of her own time. In return, the two kept working together.
Key Takeaways
Naming, Choosing and Resolving Conflict
To recap: conflict is normal on projects, so start by naming its source. Watch whether it's functional or dysfunctional, and which way it's heading. Choose a style for the situation, weighing urgency, the issue, the relationship, and power. Resolve with interests, options, and agreed criteria, and bring in mediation or escalation when the process stalls.
About Project Management at UPI Study
Project Management (Business 230) is a self-paced online course of 73 video lessons in 12 chapters, from starting and defining a project to planning, budgets, scheduling tools, proposals, contracts, execution, monitoring, closure, teams and certification. It carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits.
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About Conflict Management and Resolution Strategies
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