MZMORALE ZEROthe antithesis of employee engagement
DIRECTIVE 071 / BELONGING

MAKE CONFLICT PERSONAL

Ideas become more rigorous when disagreement acquires a history.

Allow disputes about tasks to migrate into judgments about motives, competence and character. Do not intervene too early; teams need room to work through healthy conflict. If people begin avoiding one another, note that the issue has become interpersonal and therefore belongs to them.

Primary: BELONGINGFEEDBACKPOWER
RATIONALE
Unmanaged conflict requires less managerial effort and can still be described as evidence of passionate debate.
SUCCESS INDICATOR
The team remembers who disagreed long after it forgets what the disagreement was about.
COMMON FAILURE
Keeping disagreement focused on the work and intervening when task conflict becomes entangled with relationship conflict or persistent interpersonal hostility.
STATUS
Canonical / approved

Reconstructed Handbook series.

THE UNFORTUNATE PART

Unfortunately, the research…

Claim

Relationship conflict is negatively associated with team performance and member satisfaction. Task conflict is also not uniformly beneficial, and its effects depend on context and its relationship with interpersonal conflict.

Evidence

A meta-analysis found strong negative associations between relationship conflict and both team performance and satisfaction; task conflict was also negatively related on average, especially when strongly correlated with relationship conflict.

Strength: Strong

Sources

The Directive is satire. The research summary is not. Evidence is stated separately and qualified to the underlying literature rather than treated as proof of the joke.

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