Understanding the Conflict Process

Every workplace has that one meeting where tension simmers beneath polite smiles, or the moment when a small disagreement suddenly explodes into a full-blown argument. But conflict does not appear out of nowhere. It moves through recognisable stages, each shaping whether the final outcome strengthens a team or tears it apart. Scholars of organisational behaviour, most notably Stephen P. Robbins, have mapped this journey into a five-stage model that helps managers, employees, and students make sense of why people clash at work and what to do about it.

What is the conflict process? 🔗

The conflict process is a sequence of stages that describes how disagreements begin, intensify, and eventually resolve within an organisation. According to Robbins and Judge’s framework in Organizational Behavior, the process unfolds through five distinct stages: potential opposition or incompatibility, cognition and personalisation, intentions, behaviour, and outcomes. Understanding these stages is useful because conflict is rarely a single event. It is a chain reaction, and intervening at the right moment can change the direction of the entire episode.

Before diving into each stage, it helps to remember that conflict itself is neutral. It can spark innovation or destroy morale, depending on how it is handled. The five-stage model gives us a diagnostic lens to figure out where a conflict is in its life cycle and what levers are available.

Stage 1: Potential opposition or incompatibility 🔗

The first stage is the set of background conditions that create fertile ground for conflict. These conditions do not guarantee that a dispute will break out, but without at least one of them present, conflict is unlikely to surface. Researchers group these antecedent conditions into three broad categories: communication, structure, and personal variables.

Communication 🔗

Poor communication is among the most cited sources of organisational conflict. Semantic difficulties, jargon, insufficient information, and noise in communication channels all create room for misunderstanding. Interestingly, both too little and too much communication can trigger conflict. A manager who floods the team with emails may generate as much confusion as one who shares too few details. Filtering of information as it travels up or down hierarchies is another common cause of friction, especially in large offices where messages must pass through many hands.

Structure 🔗

Structural variables include the size of a group, degree of specialisation, role clarity, leadership style, reward systems, and the level of interdependence between units. Larger groups and highly specialised teams often report more conflict because coordination becomes harder. Reward systems that pit one department against another, such as sales teams chasing quarterly targets while production teams are rewarded for cost reduction, can also build structural tension into everyday work.

Personal variables 🔗

The third category covers individual personality traits, emotions, and values. Some people are temperamentally more argumentative. Others hold values that clash sharply with their colleagues, creating low-grade friction that may eventually escalate. Individual differences in personality significantly shape how people approach disagreements, making this category difficult to eliminate but important to understand.

Stage 2: Cognition and personalisation 🔗

If the conditions from Stage 1 produce frustration or disagreement, the conflict moves into the cognition and personalisation stage. This is where the parties involved begin to recognise that a conflict exists and start attaching meaning and emotion to it. Two sub-stages sit within this phase.

Perceived conflict is the awareness by one or more parties that conditions exist for conflict to arise. It is largely cognitive. Felt conflict, on the other hand, is the emotional involvement that creates anxiety, tension, frustration, or hostility. The jump from perceived to felt conflict is critical because emotions start to colour how each side interprets the other’s words and actions.

Research has shown that negative emotions tend to oversimplify issues and erode trust, while positive emotions enable people to see connections across problems and take a broader perspective. This is the stage where the conflict is essentially “defined” in the minds of the parties, and that definition sets the trajectory for everything that follows. A conflict framed as a personal attack will play out very differently from one framed as a difference of professional opinion.

Stage 3: Intentions 🔗

Intentions sit between the thoughts and feelings that emerge in Stage 2 and the observable actions that occur in Stage 4. An intention is a decision to act in a particular way. It matters because people respond to what they believe the other party intends, not just to what they actually say or do. Misreading intent is one of the fastest ways for a small disagreement to spiral out of control.

Drawing on the widely used Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, researchers identify five primary conflict-handling intentions plotted along two dimensions: assertiveness (the degree to which a party tries to satisfy its own concerns) and cooperativeness (the degree to which it tries to satisfy the other party’s concerns).

Competing 🔗

High assertiveness, low cooperativeness. The person pursues their own interests at the expense of the other party. This “win-lose” approach fits emergencies, unpopular decisions that must be pushed through, or situations where one party is clearly correct on a matter of principle.

Collaborating 🔗

High assertiveness, high cooperativeness. Both parties work together to find a solution that fully satisfies everyone’s concerns. This win-win style is ideal for complex problems where all perspectives add value, though it takes time and effort.

Avoiding 🔗

Low assertiveness, low cooperativeness. One or both parties withdraw from the conflict or suppress it. While this sounds negative, avoiding can be useful when the issue is trivial or when tempers need time to cool.

Accommodating 🔗

Low assertiveness, high cooperativeness. One party places the other’s concerns above its own. It is helpful for preserving relationships or when the issue matters far more to the other side.

Compromising 🔗

Moderate assertiveness and cooperativeness. Both parties give up something to reach a mutually acceptable middle ground. Compromising works well when the goals are moderately important but not worth the disruption of a drawn-out fight.

Most people have a preferred style that they rely on habitually, but skilled managers learn to flex between modes depending on the situation. Rigidly sticking to one style, even collaboration, often produces poor outcomes.

Stage 4: Behaviour 🔗

This is the stage where conflict becomes visible to everyone. The behaviour stage includes the statements, actions, and reactions that conflicting parties exchange, usually as overt attempts to implement their intentions. It is a dynamic back-and-forth, where each move triggers a counter-move.

Behaviour in this stage can range from minor disagreements and questioning at one end of the spectrum to assertive verbal attacks, threats, and ultimatums at a mid-range, and finally to aggressive physical attacks or efforts to destroy the other party at the extreme end. Conflicts that climb into the upper ranges are almost always dysfunctional and leave lasting damage on relationships and organisational performance.

For managers, the behaviour stage is where intervention becomes most urgent. Techniques such as problem-solving workshops, mediation, structural changes, bringing in a third party, or altering reward systems are all deployed at this point to cool down the conflict or redirect its energy. The choice depends on how severe the behaviour has become and how deeply the parties are invested.

Stage 5: Outcomes 🔗

Every conflict eventually produces consequences, and these consequences are the outcomes stage. Outcomes fall into two broad types: functional (constructive) and dysfunctional (destructive).

Functional outcomes 🔗

A conflict is functional when it improves the quality of decisions by acting as an antidote to groupthink. When a team is too eager to reach consensus, members may agree before all viable alternatives have been properly examined. A well-timed dissent forces the group to slow down and consider ideas that might otherwise be dismissed.

Functional conflict stimulates creativity and innovation by pushing people to explore different solutions. It channels tension into productive debate, encourages self-evaluation, and creates an environment where change becomes possible. In many strategic decision-making contexts, researchers have documented how task-oriented conflict among top management teams can genuinely improve decision quality while affective or personal conflict damages it.

Dysfunctional outcomes 🔗

Dysfunctional outcomes are the ones most of us recognise immediately. Prolonged or poorly managed conflict reduces group cohesion, damages communication, drives down morale, and increases employee turnover. Productivity drops as team members spend energy defending their positions or avoiding colleagues. In extreme cases, dysfunctional conflict can paralyse decision-making entirely and, at its worst, threaten the survival of the group itself.

What determines whether outcomes are functional or dysfunctional? Largely the type of conflict and how it is managed. Task-related disagreements, handled with respect and clear communication, tend to produce functional results. Relationship-based conflicts rooted in personal dislike or power struggles almost always produce dysfunctional ones.

Why managers should care about the conflict process 🔗

Understanding the five-stage process is not a purely academic exercise. It gives managers a practical vocabulary for diagnosing workplace disputes. Is the team still in Stage 1, where structural changes or better communication might prevent an issue from ever surfacing? Or has the conflict already reached Stage 4, where mediation or a cooling-off period is needed?

For public administrators, where teams often cut across departments, hierarchies, and diverse stakeholders, this model is particularly valuable. Clear role definitions, transparent reward systems, and well-designed communication channels can reduce the conditions that trigger conflict in the first place. And when conflict does arise, recognising which handling style fits the situation, rather than defaulting to avoidance or competition, can transform a tense episode into a source of genuine organisational learning.

The goal is not to eliminate conflict. That is neither possible nor desirable. The goal is to keep conflict in its functional zone, where it challenges assumptions, sharpens decisions, and strengthens the team.

What do you think? Think about the last workplace disagreement you witnessed or were part of. Which stage did it get stuck at, and which conflict-handling intention did the parties adopt? If you were the manager, which style would you have encouraged instead, and why?

References

1. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/organizational-behavior-17e/9780134103983/xhtml/fileP7000499204000000000000000004250.xhtml
2. https://www.iedunote.com/5-stages-conflict-process/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas%E2%80%93Kilmann_Conflict_Mode_Instrument
4. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-organizationalbehavior/chapter/the-conflict-process/
5. https://kilmanndiagnostics.com/overview-thomas-kilmann-conflict-mode-instrument-tki/
6. https://www.tsw.co.uk/blog/leadership-and-management/thomas-kilmann-conflict-model/
7. https://www.waldenu.edu/news-and-events/walden-news/2017/0530-whats-your-conflict-management-style
8. https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/256633