In business, is conflict bad or beneficial? To this seemingly simple question, research in managerial sciences has provided complex answers and, above all, which have varied greatly over the decades. In the 1960s, specialists defined conflict as a blockage of normal decision-making mechanisms. Totally negative, then. Then, in the 1990s, various studies showed that the link between conflict and performance could be ambivalent, and sometimes positive. A beginning of redemption, which will not last. As early as 2003, a meta-analysis – the ultimate in scientific proof, which consists of compiling the results of dozens of studies – seemed to close the debate, confirming that the conflict was still harmful. But the research continued, and ten years later a new meta-analysis finally showed that certain disagreements, in certain circumstances, could prove beneficial.
We are still there today. “The reality is that conflict is inevitable and inherent to any human organization, since it involves different and interdependent individuals. The whole question is then how to manage it, and the answers will be different depending on the type of quarrel”, summarizes the American psychologist Denise Rousseau, one of the high priestess of evidence-based management. The absence of disagreements, large or small, would now even pass for an incongruity: “A quiet, harmonious organization could well in fact be apathetic, uncreative, stagnant, rigid and unreactive”, indicated Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal, specialists in management and former professors at Harvard, in their work In the minds of great leaders.
Experts generally distinguish three types of confrontations. Relational conflict, destructive and harmful. When a confrontation becomes a personal affair, all of the employees’ energy is absorbed by managing negative emotions. “We must deal with these situations as soon as possible, to avoid reaching impasses,” warns Arnaud Stimec, professor at the University of Nantes, specialist in mediation and negotiation. Process conflicts (how we organize ourselves, who does what) should also be banned: “When they become recurrent, they result in considerable waste of time. These questions must be resolved once and for all,” continues Arnaud Stimec. .
Highlighting blind spots
But it is different with task conflicts, relating to the content of the work itself. “There is evidence that when teams experience moderate operational conflict, they produce more original ideas […]innovate more and make better decisions”, underlines psychologist Adam Grant, professor of management at the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania), in his bestseller Think Again. In France, work psychologist Yves Clot, professor emeritus at Cnam, speaks of “conflictual cooperation”. A practice that companies would even, according to his work, have everything to gain from cultivating.
“The discussion around a job ‘well done’ is necessarily conflictual, because it is impossible to have the same outlook on the front line and in a management position. But organizing these conflicts makes it possible to highlight blind spots, to create new quality, to discover ideas that we had not thought of until then”, underlines Yves Clot. Recent history, at Volkswagen with the “dieselgate” scandal, at Sanofi with the failed Covid vaccines, at Nestlé with the contaminated pizza affair, shows that stifling any possibility of internal dispute over the quality of work can lead to disasters.
It is still necessary to prevent task conflict from turning into personal conflict. But for this, managers normally have a well-stocked toolbox, taught in all good training courses: consider disagreement as a debate, less likely to be taken personally; ask “how” rather than “why”; recognize the commonalities…
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