Workplace conflict costs American businesses nearly $360 billion a year. But according to organizational psychologist Liane Davey (a.k.a. the “Teamwork Doctor”) the problem isn’t conflict itself. It’s that we’re doing it wrong.
What Is Productive Conflict?
Not all conflict is created equal. Davey distinguishes between two types:
Healthy conflict feels like yoga — uncomfortable, but strengthening. It stretches your thinking, surfaces new perspectives, and leads to better decisions.
Unhealthy conflict feels like a blister — friction that slows you down, wears you out, and leaves everyone worse off. Think: interrupting, personal attacks, gossip, and passive aggression.
The mistake most people make is using discomfort as the measure of whether conflict is healthy. It isn’t. Even productive conflict is uncomfortable. The real question is whether it’s generating new insight — or just heat.
Why We Avoid Conflict (And Why That’s a Problem)
Humans are wired for cooperation within their in-group, which means our biology actively works against productive disagreement with teammates. Add to that a cultural tendency to equate harmony with good teamwork, and you get organizations full of “undiscussables” — issues everyone knows about but no one raises.
The result: groupthink, poor decisions, and the kind of silence that has contributed to real organizational disasters.
Davey’s fix: reframe conflict as a feature, not a bug. Cross-functional teams exist precisely to surface tension between competing priorities. If there’s no conflict, there probably shouldn’t be a meeting.
The Three Roles in Unhealthy Conflict
When friction-based conflict takes hold, Davey identifies three roles at play:
- The Wicked — someone behaving dismissively or making personal judgments
- The Wounded — someone who has slipped into a victim mindset, often pulling others into the drama
- The Witness — a bystander who has the most power to change the dynamic
You only need one of these roles to shift for the whole dynamic to change. Witnesses in particular can redirect gossip, reframe narratives, and broker more constructive conversations.
How to Build a Team That Embraces Conflict
Davey recommends starting with a structured exercise (published in Harvard Business Review) that asks each team member three questions:
- What unique value does your role bring to our deliberations?
- What stakeholders are you uniquely responsible for?
- What tension are you obliged to put on our discussions?
This reframes disagreement as a job requirement rather than a personality clash — and builds empathy across functions in the process.
From there, leaders must visibly reward dissent. When someone raises a hard truth, the response matters enormously. Davey’s advice: be authentic about how it lands (“that’s hard to hear”), then express genuine gratitude for the courage it took to say it.
Four Rules for Speaking Truth to Power
When conflict involves someone more senior, Davey recommends this framework:
- Tie it to a business outcome they care about. Lead with what matters to them, not what bothers you.
- Remove all subjectivity. Use nouns and verbs, not adjectives. State facts, not feelings.
- Invoke shared values or ground rules. If your company values integrity or transparency, use that language.
- Propose a trial, not a verdict. Instead of asserting a position, suggest an experiment: “What if we tried X for 30 days?”
The Bottom Line
Conflict avoidance doesn’t preserve harmony — it just buries the tension until it becomes toxic. Teams that learn to disagree well make better decisions, build deeper trust, and outperform those that prioritize comfort over candor.
As Davey puts it: “If there’s no conflict, there shouldn’t even be a meeting.”
This post is based on an episode of Women Amplified, the podcast from the Conferences for Women, featuring Liane Davey, author of You First and the forthcoming Thought Load.
