Managing Conflict in Remote Teams
By: Joe Thornton
Tags: Startup, Team Collaboration, Team Building, Conflict, Team

Leaders adept at fostering unity in traditional work environments may witness higher than usual interpersonal conflict when forming teams in a distributed environment. Here I attempt to explain why and the steps leaders can take to mitigate such risk.

The Two Forms of Conflict

Conflict is simply disagreement. And of course, not all disagreement is bad. If you’ve heard the term “diversity of opinion,” you might also know that teams that disagree with each other usually make better decisions, reach conclusions faster and experience greater satisfaction amongst individual team members.

Therefore, effectively managing conflict first requires an understanding of its two distinct forms, as well as the relationship between them.

Relationship conflict

Relationship conflict refers to interpersonal incompatibilities amongst team members and is highly detrimental to group functioning. Teams in which members dislike or distrust one another tend to experience less collaboration and ultimately produce inferior results. Leaders must identify relationship conflict and proactively root it out at every opportunity.

Task conflict

Task conflict, on the other hand, which relates to disagreements over how specific work tasks should be performed, should generally be encouraged by leaders. Picture a lively debate between two marketeers over which marketing channels should receive more budget allocation. Answering these questions often involves performing complex analytical tasks, which benefit from differences in perspective. As new and challenging perspectives are introduced into the decision making process, decision quality is greatly improved.

The Misattribution Problem

The problem arises when employees misattribute task conflict to relationship conflict, which happens frequently in work environments. Everyone has, at some point, mistakenly interpreted criticisms of their work as a personal attack and experienced the visceral response that ensues.

For most people, rational thinking prevails when the incident is replayed at a later point in time. Others, however, are less adept at analysing such interactions, which allows hostility to get a foothold in the team, inevitably leading to dangerous levels of interpersonal conflict.

Managing Conflict Remotely

So how does a leader prevent task conflict from morphing into relationship conflict?

Trust

The cycle can only be broken through the presence of trust. Teams that exhibit high levels of trust experience lower associations between task and relationship conflict. In my last post I listed some common strategies for building trust amongst remote teams and gave examples of how we’ve implemented them at Playfair.

When forming new teams in a remote environment, leaders may anticipate challenges in building trust amongst a group of people who have met each other. However, newly-formed teams often experience levels of trust that usually takes individuals quite some time to build between themselves. It’s an interesting psychological quirk in which group members, recognising that work needs to be done immediately, are willing to assume that trust exists from the outset.

However, team members will adjust their trust beliefs over time as they begin to learn about their colleagues. Therefore, trust is very much conditional and needs to be reinforceded and calibrated. Leadership plays a critical role in this process.

In addition to influencing the core norms that regulate the behaviour of the team, leaders must also play a pivotal role in monitoring staff interactions and intervening and taking action when necessary.

In distributed teams, regular check ins with team members probing specifically on their working relationships with others can reveal important conflict that was not otherwise apparent. Getting to the root of such conflict as soon as possible is essential to maintaining effective group functioning.

The simplest way of achieving trust from the outset is through an autoreinforcing mechanism. Leaders must act with trust from the outset, providing the social proof to other team members that trust do indeed exist. Senior team members should also be encouraged to entrust tasks to junior members at the early stages of group formation or project work.

Group Norms

Interpersonal conflict is also usually moderated by group norms (unwritten rules about which behaviours are appropriate) which, in traditional office settings, arise to a great extent through the conduct of the leader, and often occur subtly and without the leader realising that they’re norm setting.

How an inappropriate joke is reacted to. How criticism from a peer is handled. The way language is used. The way customers are treated. By observing these scenarios play out, employees — especially junior ones — are constantly learning how they themselves are expected to act in similar situations.

In remote environments, such behaviours are not as readily on display (mostly due to there being fewer interactions between team member, as well as the asymmetries between what each person can see and hear when interacting on video calls). As such, proactive leadership becomes critical in establishing group norms.

In distributed teams, regular check ins with team members probing specifically on their working relationships with others can reveal important conflict that was not otherwise apparent. Getting to the root of such conflict as soon as possible is essential to maintaining effective group functioning.

In my last post I talked about some of the norms we’ve implemented at Playfair that have helped in our transition to working remotely (daily standups, encouraging peers to call each other when calendars are free, etc.).

In addition to influencing the core norms that regulate the behaviour of the team, leaders must also play a pivotal role in monitoring staff interactions and intervening and taking action when necessary.

In distributed teams, regular check ins with team members probing specifically on their working relationships with others can reveal important conflict that was not otherwise apparent. Getting to the root of such conflict as soon as possible is essential to maintaining effective group functioning.

Purpose & Recognition

Part of keeping a team focused on the mission and reducing opportunities for conflict to arise involves instilling a purpose in the work the team is being asked to carry out. Leaders need to draw a clear link between the team’s output and the company’s overall objectives. Purpose in teams is an extremely important mediator of intragroup conflict.

In what will perhaps be a surprise to many leaders, organisational recognition and reward for performance should be linked to team performance, not individual performance. If a team is to share in the efforts of pulling off a valuable project, there is no sense in pointing to the efforts of certain individuals on the team.

Such leadership behaviour will promote political status-seeking behaviour within the group, reducing the ability of trust to develop and leading to destructive levels of conflict.

By all means individual high flyers ought to be recognised, even rewarded, for their outsized contribution to the team; but such recognition and reward should typically occur privately between the individual and their manager.